Nighthawk Blues (13 page)

The others just stared at him blankly.

Outside Thayer had started the car. They would leave him here, Jerry sensed in a panic. They would abandon him without a moment’s thought. He cast one eye toward the door and turned back one last time to the old men clustered around the stove.

“You say this fella named T.R.?” said one in an oversized checkered cap that puffed up from his head. “Well, say, this T.R., did he have a big old guitar, one of them hollow-bodied old Stellas that he plug in to a electric box?”

Jerry shrugged. For all he knew the Screamin’ Nighthawk was no more than a figment of his imagination.

“Well, say, I knew a boy used to work down at Dooley’s Garage, used to play a big old guitar until he joined the choich” —Jerry’s spirits fell—“but naw, that was J.R., isn’t that right?”

“Yeah, that’s right. J.R. J.R.,” a chorus of voices answered him.

“Yeah. J.R. Benwell, that the one. You want to speak to J.R. Benwell, you gwine have to speak to the warden down at Parchman first. He doing life for cutting his woman’s throat. Course that woman was cheating on him every kind of way, and the poor fool didn’t know it until he come home find her in bed with another woman. But the judge sent him up just the same.”

They shook their heads sadly over the fate of J.R. Benwell. Jerry thought he was going to cry. They were just toying with him, he thought helplessly. Outside Thayer leaned on his horn. The old man on the porch was still rocking when Jerry came out. He didn’t mean any harm; he just didn’t know how to show it.

“T.R., T.R.,” said the squat, heavy-set man with the big voice, standing in the doorway behind him. “Well, you know, I think that might ring a bell. Ain’t he the feller lives out on the edge of the swamp, out on the old Holloway Plantation?” From within Jerry could hear a mumbled chorus of assent. “Well, say, now, that might just be your man.”

“T.R. Jefferson,” Jerry repeated patiently.

“Yeah, that the one. You want to know where he lives, right?”

Jerry nodded, not quite trusting his own voice.

“You think you can follow directions? Well now. You follow the old West Oak Road, turn towards the river at the first fork you come to, then you come to an old bridge, go straight on across—
don’t take no turns
-after you cross that bridge you just follow the signs to the Holloway Plantation, you can’t miss it, unless’n you take the wrong turn—”

Excitedly Jerry took the directions down in his little notebook, blurted out his profuse thanks, and practically fell over himself running down the steps toward the car, which was turning around on the dusty shoulder. The old mummy on the porch had scarcely moved.

They got hopelessly lost. By the time they had finally come to a bridge—and they hadn’t the slightest idea if it was the right bridge—they had been driving around for nearly two hours in what was beginning to seem like trackless Arctic waste. Thayer and Hartl were yelling at him separately. “Well, that’s what you get for listening to those shiftless niggers,” said Hartl. “About all they’re good for is singing and dancing anyway.”

“God,” said Thayer. “You really have led us on a wild goose chase, haven’t you?”

“I mean, it’s all right listening to the music, but as far as giving directions goes, they’re not really worth a shit.”

“The first thing we should have done,” said Thayer, “was to have him show us on the map. I can’t believe I have to travel all the way to Mississippi just to find another New York racist.”

Was this what it was like, Jerry wondered, for Alan Lomax on his great pioneering field expeditions?

They saw an old man on a mule riding at a somnolent gait down a solitary dirt lane by the side of the road. He was wearing a broad-brimmed preacher’s hat and seemed half asleep when Thayer slowed the car down and called out to him. “Excuse me,” said Thayer to the old man, “we were looking for a black man named T.R. Jefferson, a blues singer. You wouldn’t happen to know where he lives?”

“You on the wrong road,” said the man without a moment’s hesitation. The mule proceeded at its stately pace, and Thayer kept the car even with him in herky-jerky fashion.

“This gentleman seems to be a cut above his fellows,” whispered Hartl with embarrassing volume. “You can tell from his professorial mien that he’s read Hegel.”

“This man, Mr. Jefferson, is an old-time blues singer,” Thayer explained gravely. “Professionally he has been known as the Screamin’ Nighthawk.”

“Hunh!”

“He used to play an old Stella,” said Jerry.

“I already done tole you, you headin’ in a wild goose chase if you lookin’ for his house. Now you got to turn around, go back to the bridge, take your second left, road go down in between the fields, you jes’ keep driving till you can’t drive no more.”

“And then?”

The man looked at them with some disdain. “That’s Jefferson’s house.” When none of them said anything, he kicked the mule, which seemed to affect its gait not at all, shook his head, and muttered half to himself, “Ain’t that what you said you wanted?”

They left him in the dust. Thayer, with one hand on the wheel, started fiddling with the portable tape recorder. “Will you tell him to keep his eyes on the road, for God’s sake?” said Hartl. “You know, I get the impression, gentlemen, that we may be on to something. Do you suppose that jigaboo has any conception of the historic service he may have done the world?”

Jerry’s hands were sweating.

“My God,” said Thayer, “do you think we’ve really done it? Can you imagine what it will be like to have rediscovered the Screamin’ Nighthawk? I can’t even imagine what his reaction will be.”

“What do you mean?” said Jerry.

“Well, this is almost like finding out that Robert Johnson is still alive or rediscovering Blind Willie McTell.”

“But
he
knows that he’s still alive,” said Jerry. If he
was
still alive, if this wasn’t one more joke on the part of the state of Mississippi, which seemed aligned in a common conspiracy, black and white, against them.

“But he doesn’t know how important he is.”

They headed down the mud-rutted road between the cotton rows, picking up speed and sending up dust. It seemed as if the low leafy cotton plants would never stop but go on forever, and Jerry was sure they were off on another wild goose chase. “Maybe we’ll find Tommy McClennan off in the bushes somewhere,” said Hard. “After all, didn’t he record ’Cotton Patch Blues’?”

At last the rows of cotton plants gave out, and they came to one or two pitiful little tar-paper shacks, but the road kept going, so they did, too, until finally it gave out altogether, just became a rutted wagon track which Thayer was reluctant to subject the rented car to. So they got out and walked, proceeding single-file in the direction of an isolated misshapen structure, propped up on poles beside a muddy creek, which was as far as you could go. They approached the house with trepidation, though it looked deserted. Inside there was no clear sign of recent occupancy. In the single main room there was a dirty mattress, a straw pallet, a rusty old woodburning stove with a pot of fetid water sitting on top of it, and a big brass bed. The walls were patched with newspaper and decorated with pictures of dogs of all kinds. In the yard a few chickens ran loose. It was hard to say whether the house had been left that morning by people who lived there and actually intended to return or if it had been abandoned some months before. There was no indication of who its occupants were or had been. They called out loudly, but of course no one answered, and when they went outside the children who had been playing in the fields nearby had disappeared. When they got back out to the highway, they met the old man again, seemingly no closer to his destination than he was when they first spied him. “You find T.R.’s place all right?” he asked equably.

“There wasn’t anyone there.”

“Naw, that’s right, he ain’t there,” said the old man. “Wife took sick, the new one, that is, and she over there in the county hospital with her new baby. T.R. probably at the Sunset Cafe, leastaways that’s where I left him, couldn’t have been more than an hour ago.”

They got directions to the Sunset Cafe, followed them this time without a hitch, and ended up at the same general store from which they had first started out. It was deserted now, grown almost dark in the gathering twilight. Only the jukebox and the light over the pool table brightly glowed. Sitting alone at the counter was the same squat heavy-set man who had plugged in the jukebox for them. “You young gentlemens looking for the Screamin’ Nighthawk?” he said without even a chuckle. “Well, you come to the right place.”

THE KIDS
came in for lunch, Elyse, Little Bo, and Rufus. The television still flickered soundlessly above the refrigerator. Mattie bustled around and shushed the kids. Jerry gratefully devoured the hot dogs she set before him. “We got over five thousand dollar in the bank,” said Mattie. “Imagine that.”

Jerry looked around the ramshackle house and found it difficult to imagine. “What are you going to do with it?”

Mattie put her hand to her mouth as if she were embarrassed, as if the thought had never occurred to her. “Well, it nice to have something to fall back on. You know, Roosevelt ain’t getting any younger, maybe he like to take it easy for a while. How he get along with that Teenochie anyway, no bull?”

Jerry shrugged. “Okay, I guess. They had their differences.”

“I imagine so.” Mattie giggled. “I imagine so. Roosevelt never could stand that man. He always act like he too big for his britches. Why, I remember one time he come riding up in his Cadillac—course it wasn’t really his, finance company seen to that soon enough—but he want Roosevelt to go out on the road with him, you know what he want him to do? Do the cooking, do the driving, just generally do for him like he was his chauffeur. Roosevelt, that practically raised him from a kid and even still got a bigger name than him to this day. But he just want to show Roosevelt he was doing good, know what I mean? I guess that’s just the way with some folk.”

“I guess so,” said Jerry. “Hey, you must be in the fourth grade now,” he said to Little Bo. Bo looked up at him with the same hooded eyes as his father. “Don’t go to school no more,” he said with indifferent hostility.

“Now don’t you go talking to Mr. Jerry like that. It ain’t his fault how they be doing you.”

“Why? What are they doing to Scooter?” said Jerry, thinking of race, rednecks, riots.

“They tell me Scooter too slow,” said Mattie. “They want us to enroll him at a special school cause they say he got a reading problem. If he go over there, he be riding the bus back and forth ten, fifteen miles every day. Roosevelt say he ain’t got no big problem, riding that bus give him more of a problem than anything he gonna get in school.”

“Why? What’s the matter with riding the bus?”

“What I want with school for anyway?”

“School’s over in River View. Hawk don’t want him riding to where they won’t allow him to play.” Mattie shrugged. “He big enough to help with the chores now, Little Bo a big help around the house, ain’t you, sugar?”

“Pretty soon I’m going to go out with my daddy,” said Little Bo. “He’s learning me to play guitar. I figure I practice up real good, and I can second him on guitar, just like Daddy Rabbit used to do.”

Mattie pursed her lips in a nervous smile. “Now you quit that kind of talk,” she said, evidently pleased, embarrassed, a little bit angry, but she didn’t say why. Jerry glanced over at Dicey, and she hid behind her mother’s back. “I guess you’ve started school now, too,” he said to her. She didn’t say a word, but stole a look from behind her mother. Mattie yanked her by a pigtail. “Now you answer Mr. Jerry,” she said.

Dicey peeked out from behind her mother. “Uh huh,” she said.

“How do you like it?”

“Oh, I likes it
fine.
”

Everyone laughed. “How about you? Do you ride the bus every day?”

Dicey nodded. “She waits at the end of the lane,” said Mat-tie. “Her brother waits with her. It just about kills me to see him standing out there waiting for that bus to come, then just waving his little sister goodbye. He just a baby—”

“I am not!”

“He ought be gitting his education, too. I gonna see if I can get Roosevelt to go down there and talk to them people. And if he don’t, I’m gonna do it myself. It just ain’t right, the way they doing him. I know, cause I ain’t never had the chance myself. And I know he ain’t dumb. I just like to see every one of my children amount to something. I think Roosevelt even agree, if he could just get hisself to admit that the white man got anything worth having sides money. Well, you know Roosevelt. He too proud to ask for a drink of water if he parched, let alone ask something of a white man. Meaning no disrespect.” She smiled sweetly at Jerry, and Jerry no longer even felt uncomfortable. He enjoyed talking to Mattie, to this woman who had barely spoken a word in his presence for the first three years that he had known her, cowering under the gaze of her husband, the influence of her father, speechless with—what? Fear? Perhaps—or maybe it was just a natural discretion which allowed her to take things in for her own education.