Nighthawk Blues (15 page)

“Aw, I ain’t got the breath no more. I got the will all right, but I just ain’t got the breath.”

“Well, go on and see how you feels then.”

They watched the old man trudging off in the dust. Out on the edge of town beyond where the streets were paved they passed a barbershop-poolhall where the young men dressed slick. Hawk sniffed a little contemptuously and spat out the window. “Any young blues players around here?” Jerry asked.

“You mean them? Naw, they wouldn’t want to get their hair mussed. I think they spends more time in front of the mirror looking at themselves than they do looking at the girls that pass by. Back then we used to call ’em sissy men, don’t know how they get along less’n they got a gang of women working for them.”

Then they were out of town and in the cool magnolia-scented breeze. Big pillared mansions sat back from the road across rolling lawns. Hawk gazed at one of them. “Mr. Jack lived there until his business went bust, cause he spent all his money on a high yaller named Dorothy Mae. I played out there back in ’34, when Mr. Jack’s father had the place. We didn’t play nothing but jigs and reels all night long, it was Mr. Jack’s graduation, and all them nice young people danced up a storm. Danced up a storm, them folkses, they say we got to have you back, we got to have you at all our parties. Course they never did. But we played some other fine parties around that time, lots of ’em. Mr. Jack, he have a real craving for yallers.”

Farther and farther out into the country, past the mansions, past the plantations, dotted with little tar-paper shacks, back into the swamp, where once again Hawk seemed to know every straggling face and have a word on the history or ancestry of the inhabitant of every shack they passed. They never did find Booger Jake, Jerry began to doubt that he even existed, since no one else seemed to have given any thought to him in years. Hawk, he realized, was trying to tell him something. Of course Jerry knew better, he knew what was good for Hawk. Even now Hawk spent less than half his time in this little world. Well, what if instead of going to Georgia he went to England, instead of playing some litde Florida juke joint he played at Harvard? He could probably spend more time around Yola then, come home with more money, earn the respect of those slicks down at Lawson’s Pool Hall and Barber Shop, maybe even retire someday to a well-earned rest. Well, in the end, Jerry thought, neither of them turned out to be completely right or wrong.

After three more days of this Hard just disappeared one day. Jerry checked the bus depot, which doubled as Myrtle’s Restaurant. Yes, a long-haired Yankee had bought a ticket to Jackson, didn’t say where he was going from there, but Jerry surmised he must have flown back to New York. In any case within a month there was a story in
Time
magazine hailing the rediscovery of the legendary blues singer the Screamin’ Nighthawk, mentioning the efforts of three collectors but featuring a picture of Hawk and George Hard alone in the Sunset Cafe. Subsequently he wrote a fanciful series of articles in the
Village Voice
on their rediscovery, a series which, for all of its romantic invention, in its articulateness, generosity, irony, and compassion showed a side that Hard had never evidenced in the flesh. Maybe, Jerry thought, that was the true Hard, a part of him anyway; you couldn’t pretend to be something you absolutely were not. But then within a year or so Hard put out an unauthorized collection of some tapes he must have made while they were in Yola, which included snatches of songs and more complete versions of Hawk cursing out Hard and threatening him with bodily harm if he didn’t put that damn machine away. The fidelity was horrible, there couldn’t have been a total of more than twenty minutes on the two sides, the sleeve was a blank white cardboard with a crude hand-stamped caricature on the cover, and Jerry, who was engaged in delicate negotiations with RCA at that point, got an injunction against him. The deal fell through anyway, probably because RCA couldn’t think of a way to market Hawk regardless of what else he might have out at the time. He wasn’t humble like Mississippi John Hurt nor falling apart with drink and age like Son House. He was just himself, just—Hawk. Jerry saw Hard in court, where Hartl sneered at him that he was glad to see that Jerry was still a friend to the workingman. Since then he had not seen him again. Thayer had published his scholarly treatise in the
Journal of American Folklore
a couple of years later, complete with footnotes and cross references and a catalog of all the records that were on the jukebox in the Sunset Cafe that day.

Haiti’s departure left Jerry alone, still hanging around nearly three weeks after the discovery, unable to talk the object of their search into even agreeing to be found, unable to make up his own mind to leave, unable to make up his mind to stay. Mattie was out of the hospital and looked small and scared in the big brass bed, with Scooter grabbing onto her for dear life. She didn’t say anything, just stared at Jerry with big saucer eyes, as if he were some exotic white vision her husband had conjured into their lives. Which in a way was how Jerry was beginning to feel himself: conjured, bewitched, held against his will.

“What you want to hang around here for?” Hawk demanded of him, as he moped around, seemingly dogging Hawk’s every step. “I be leaving soon. Peaches to be picked in Georgia, those folkses going to have money sure. What you gonna do? You wanna learn something about the road, you stick with me, boy. Ain’t nothin’ I can’t teach you, but ain’t nothin’ you going to learn. What you want with me for anyway? You don’t need no money, I can tell that. You ain’t got the connections to make nothing of it nohow. Now Mr. Melrose—Mr. Melrose, he had the connections, dressed in a great big old derby hat, wore them fancy spats, Mr. Melrose get hold of you, he had the connections to peel off a litde of that green, Jack, for hisself. I tell you the truth. You’re like the boy with the cherry. I don’t think you know what to do if I tell you yes. Why don’t you go on home, I’m doing fine just like I am. You tell the peoples that the Screamin’ Nighthawk passed, ain’t nobody down here who plays that old-style music no more. Just that rock ’n’ roll, like you hear them English boys playing on the radio. Let me just go on about my business, keep playing for my own people until they get too brainwashed to listen anymore.”

In the end it was pride, or something like it, that got to him. Just as Jerry was prepared to leave, abandon the whole thing as a fruitless quest, and regard himself as something more of a laughingstock than he did already for being unable to persuade this old black man who had nothing that what he had to offer was any better, the article in
Time
came out, with its picture of Hawk and Hartl and an insert of Hawk some thirty years earlier. The headline read: “Legendary Blues Singer: Address Now Known,” the subhead a quote from “Screamin’ Nighthawk Blues” set off in italics. The story led with a description of how the search for Hawk had taken on the status of the mythological quest for the Holy Grail among blues researchers over the years. Then it described the squalid conditions under which he lived today.

“The search for long-time blues legend the Screamin’ Night-hawk (real name: Theodore Roosevelt Jefferson) has led down many false paths. Most researchers were convinced that Night-hawk was dead, though the legend of his accomplishments persisted. Many bluesmen have been rediscovered in the past year and a half: Skip James, Son House, Sleepy John Estes, dimly remembered names from an almost forgotten past. None is of greater significance than the Screamin’ Nighthawk, who thirty years ago spawned a searing Mississippi blues tradition, making music that was pure and personal, with a bitter contempt for all of life’s injustices, in a voice which growled, moaned, shouted, screamed the blues.

“It was just a line from a song that set blues buffs George Hartl, Jerry Lipschitz, and Ralph Thayer, all under thirty, all heavily committed to careers of their own, down Highway 61, a ribbon of highway that is legendary in blues lore. It was on a narrow dirt road just off 61 that they found the Screamin’ Night-hawk through a combination of sharp detective work, careful deduction, and ’just plain dumb luck,’ Hartl says frankly.

“It was only when an obscure 45 (value: upward of $200) was spotted on a local jukebox that they actually knew they were on the right trail. ’We knew we had him then,’ said Hartl, a slight, earnest, soft-spoken young man whose dedication to the blues goes back to his schooldays when an older brother collected Blind Lemon Jefferson and Bix Beiderbecke records. Says Hard happily today: ’It would make a great detective novel!’ Certainly it has all the elements: a shadowy, elusive hero who for undisclosed reasons is forced to operate under a disguise, false leads, scattered clues, and cases of mistaken identity. In the end the path finally led to a small backwoods saloon, where a powerful middle-aged man eyed them suspiciously as they entered. ’Then he just seemed to give up the pretense altogether,’ says Hartl. ’ “I’m Hawk,” he said. “I hear you been looking for me.”’

“The aftermath was a bit anticlimactic. At first, Hartl says, the old blues master couldn’t remember his own songs at all. ’He hadn’t played in I don’t know how many years, there just wasn’t anyone who wanted to listen.’ Undaunted, Hartl and his two compatriots produced a small portable tape recorder and tapes they had made up consisting of scratchy versions of most of the Screamin’ Nighthawk’s old songs. ’Aw, I didn’t think anyone was interested in that old stuff,’ said the bemused bluesman. The intrepid researchers persuaded him, however, that there were people who
were
interested, and the hesitant Hawk set about the painful business of relearning his own songs. Progress has been good to date, though understandably slow, and Hard reports that more than half a dozen record companies are in active competition for the tapes. No bookings are definite yet, but feelers have gone out from the Newport Folk Festival, and a European tour is a ’definite possibility.’ ’I’m a screamin’ nighthawk,’ proclaims this grizzled veteran of the blues, ’Don’t never leave no track/ I goes wherever I please/ And I may not be coming back.’ Now, thanks to three young blues buffs, not only has this Hawk been tracked down after thirty years of undeserved obscurity; it looks as if he’s going to be around for a while!”

“What a piece of shit,” said Hawk after Jerry had finished reading it to him, going on after the first paragraph only with the greatest trepidation.

The barber stropped the razor and tilted Hawk’s head back.

“People really believe all that shit?”

The barber raised his eyebrows. “People believe anything you tell ’em, man,” he said and quickly returned to his work.

“That’s it. That’s it,” said Hawk. “All that bullshit, and I don’t see no money. I don’t hear nothing from none of these peoples. All I see is a magazine article. She-it!”

He grabbed the magazine from Jerry and stared at the picture of him with Hartl, then ripped out the page with one clean motion and stuffed it in his pocket. “The story ain’t about me any how,” he said at last. “Whole thing’s about the other guy, how he track me down, how you all come after me like I’m some kind of wounded beast or something. She-it,” he said, as if pondering something that he had been thinking about for a long time. “I tell you something, I’m going to do it. Let ’em see the real thing for once in their life. None of this tracking shit. Let ’em see the Hawk hisself, large as life. You tell me you with me, boy, and I’ll do it. You handle all them offers that them people keep talking about. If they can pay, Hawk’ll play. You just bring the money. Then, goddammit, we in business, boy.”

Jerry was completely floored. He had never meant to go any further than simply finding Hawk. What was supposed to happen next he had never really considered. He found himself pumping Hawk’s hand, though. And then shaking hands with the barber. He had never looked back.

THEY WAITED OUTSIDE
while the doctor examined him. Mattie looked worried but busied herself with the dishes, shoved the kids out, pestered Jerry until he accepted another cup of coffee, and then sat at the broken old table quietly wringing her hands. “I knowed he was sick,” she said in a soft voice, “but I never knowed he was sick like this.”

“I’m sure he’ll be all right,” Jerry said, still shaken by the sight of Hawk, his face gray and drained of color, his hand helplessly shaking, his look almost quizzical, as if this could be none of his doing. “Has it been going on like this for long?”

“Not so long. Only once or twicet. I can’t call the first time —oh yes, it was right after the boy’s last birthday. Roosevelt had just got back from California, I think, and I put it down to being tired from all that traveling. He been working a long time now, you know, Mr. Jerry.”

Jerry nodded.

“Ain’t nothing you can do about it, though, I guess,” Mattie concluded. “He ain’t never been one just to lie down and quit.”

The doctor pushed the burlap curtain out of the way and stepped into the kitchen. He was a tall, light-skinned man with wavy hair combed out into an Afro. He wore a well-cut suit and vest out of which a gold watch chain protruded.