Crossroad Blues (The Nick Travers Novels) (5 page)

"Yeah, I tole him the same thing. If he sees Little Tommy, tell him Blind Lilah's gonna cut his balls off."

Nick coughed.

"Sorry. You ain't used to an old woman talkin' that way. Is ya?" She cocked her head. "Is ya? Well, I always lived in a man's world and could always outplay, outfight, and outcuss any one of 'em."

"I tell you the same thing I done tole that other man come to see me las' week. Go see my son. He'll talk to you about blues all day. Hangs out with all the ole ones when he's not workin' cotton. He can tell you this and that about all the sonsabitches in Leflore County. Yeah, my son knows his shit 'bout blues."

"Where can I find him?"

Being in Mississippi, it wasn't hard to imagine Johnson rambling down these same highways. Cutting across railroad tracks and dirt roads with Johnny Shines or Honeyboy Edwards. Thumbing a ride deep into a muggy Mississippi night. Their stomachs grumbling from hunger. Rich mud caked to their shoes.

It had to be exciting to live in what Johnny Shines, a highly eloquent man, later recalled as an "exploratory world." Johnson traveled all over, to places like St. Louis, Detroit, Chicago, and New York, sometimes deciding to hop a train at a whistle's notice. His trademark was leaving a room without ever saying good-bye. Perhaps because permanence was seldom known by his family. His mother, Julia, was married to a wicker furniture maker in Hazlehurst named Charles Dodds. But a few years before Johnson was born, some prominent landowners ran Dodds out of town. He left Julia, a mistress, and several children behind.

Dodds started a new life in Memphis, where he lived under the name Spencer, and eventually sent for his mistress and some of the kids. Not Julia. Four years passed before she gave birth to Robert in 1911 by a field hand named Noah Johnson.

Julia worked migrant labor camps in the Delta to support the new baby and his sister. Back-breaking work. After a couple of hard years trying to make it on her own, she decided to go back to her husband. But by now Dodds had even more children with another wife and his mistress.

Julia was desperate and left her kids in Memphis anyway.

Nick wasn't sure how Johnson adjusted. But for a young child, about seven, it had to be tough. The mother leaves. New authority figure. And Johnson didn't exactly become the model stepson. After a few years, Dodds sent him back to his mother in Robinsonville.

Johnson didn't listen. Was troublesome.

When he rejoined his mother, she's also remarried to a man they called Dusty because of his dust-flying work ethic. The short, very dark-skinned man probably gave Johnson lessons on how to please the white bosses and become a good worker. For a while, Johnson went to school near the local plantation but dropped out. He blamed a bad eye.

Didn't really matter. Johnson wasn't interested in farming or an education.

He'd already found out how to string baling wire on the side of their house and pick out Leroy Carr's "How Long-How Long Blues." Soon he took up Jew's harp and harmonica and was sneaking out late at night to watch men like Charley Patton.

The blues was edging into his life.

It was a time of late-night jukes, whiskey, and women. Though that all stopped when he met a young girl who took his life into a big U-turn. As hard as it was for Nick to believe, Robert Johnson, the laid-back, arrogantly neat musician, started plowing behind a mule.

He'd married a young girl, all of sixteen, named Virginia Travis and settled down. He was a proud man when she became pregnant, once even getting on his brother-in-law for driving too fast. "Careful man," he'd said. "My wife's percolatin'."

The happiness didn't last, though. Virginia and the child died during labor. People blamed Johnson, because he was into what they thought was devil's music. Rather than fight it, Johnson cloaked himself in the stigma. It shrouded him, and perhaps even made people fear him in a weird way. Johnson wasn't a big man. He was small-boned with delicate hands and wavy hair. And back then, a bad mojo was better than a gun.

The superstitions remained. Mississippi was, in many ways, a time capsule. So much of the sameness that dominated America hadn't dawned on the Delta. Nick loved the region for it. That was the important thing about grabbing all the folklore before the strip malls and franchises leached the color from one of the last cultural frontiers.

Damn, it was important. Nick never fully understood blues until he started his fieldwork. Each time he returned to New Orleans loaded with more interviews and Delta stories, it all made even more sense, like a man who returns from Europe with a broader view of art and culture. There was something simple and Zen about going into the Delta with his Jeep loaded with a box of blank tapes, an old duffel bag, and a carton of cigarettes. There, the songs and lives from textbooks became real.

The blues got the railroad and levee camp workers through a life that was as bad as the serfs in medieval England. They gave roots to an internal rhythm of the spirit that beat as steady as the human heart. Beyond the pretentiousness of Mozart and jazz, the blues was riding though the bullshit, grabbing the listeners by the balls and saying, "This is what it's all about." It was a baring of the soul that chafed a man's spirit raw, a deceitful woman, being broke, and a painful loneliness of a man living in sensory deprivation, cut off from sound and human contact.

That was what Johnson surely felt when he sang "Cross Road Blues."

Standin' at the crossroad, baby

risin' sun goin' down

Standin' at the crossroad, baby

risin' sun goin' down

I believe to my soul, now,

po' Bob is sinkin' down

No one was there for Johnson. Right there in that X of dirt roads waiting for something, anything, to happen. Nick could imagine a deep orange ball of sun sinking below the cotton and darkness sweeping over the Delta. Nick believed the crossroad was a destination for Johnson, who perhaps reached the best he thought he could ever be. He'd practiced until his fingers bled and gained admiration from his mentors.

Once you've reached the final crossroad, where do you go?

Maybe Johnson couldn't see beyond those clapboard shacks. In his world, there was nowhere else allowed. That reaching of the destination was a universal human dilemma.

Nick had sweated his ass off to become a professional athlete. He'd studied until his mind throbbed, and now what else was there?
Were there no more goals? Nothing more to obtain?
The stagnant feeling sat in his stomach like a jagged stone.

Darnell Rose's dusty Oldsmobile was parked next to a mound of rich upchurned soil that looked like a spilled chocolate ice cream scoop. Nick parked next to the car and waved to the form on a John Deere tractor as it plowed under a row of harvested cotton. After a few minutes, a sinewy black man asked what he wanted, above the sound of a chugging motor.

"Just need a second of your time," Nick said, shouting.

Darnell squinted at Nick from under a tightly scrunched baseball hat, turned off the motor, and hopped down onto the soil. He wore a faded flannel shirt cut off at the sleeves, showing biceps corded like hemp rope. He was tall with a lean frame and a gaunt face.

"My name's Travers. Your mother told me I could find you out here."

"My momma? What fer?"

"I'm looking for Michael Baker. You know him?"

He squinted at Nick again. Nick smiled and slacked his shoulders, so he wouldn't give the impression of being too aggressive. "I work with him in New Orleans."

"Yeah. He come to talk to me 'bout some blues players round here. Paid me hunnard dollars to give 'im a tour. Just was with 'im a few days and he left."

"You know he's missing?"

"Deputy Brown axed me when I seen 'im las," Darnell said. "But that's all I know. What chu lookin' for 'im for? Did he do somethin' wrong?"

"Jus' to some jukes. He was real interested in the ole-timers. Wrote down almost every word they said. Yeah, the man was doin' research for a project."

Darnell's mouth curved and he stared with vacant light in his eyes, like he wished Nick would get in his Jeep and leave him alone.
He was lying.

"If I paid you, would you take me where you took him, so I can talk to the same people?"

"Sure, but it ain't gonna be till this weekend," Darnell said, tucking leather work gloves into his back pocket.

"I can double what he paid," Nick said.

"I appreciate that. But ain't nothin' open 'cept the Purple Heart tonight. We only went there once."

Across the highway, clapboard shacks intermingled with trailer homes. Faded wash hung on lines like old flags, not moving in the breezeless air.

"Yeah, I took the professor to see the ole man. He's a crazy ole son of a bitch. Says a lot of weird things when he talks which ain't that much 'cause he don't like people. In fact, I don't even known his name. Everyone jes' call him Cracker."