Nighthawk Blues (22 page)

But anyways, well, you know, there was lots of musicianers played just like him back then, only trouble with them they was dumb in the ways of the world. Long time after, after Mose got records out, the scouts’d come down, say, What you got for us, Mose? And he say, Oh sure, boss, I got something good, mmm-hmm, and he parade out some of the most raggedy-ass country clowns, some broken-down old man who couldn’t even sit up straight let alone hit a good lick, and Mose say, Yesssir, Mr. Boss Man, this the best we have. And them old whiteys look at each other, say, That the best he got. So naturally wasn’t nobody get to make records
but
Ole Man Mose. Not until Barbour gets in the scouting business hisself, and by that time I was thirty years old. Man just listen to two verses of my song, cut me off, I thought, oh boy, that’s the end of it, 01’ Mose right maybe, ain’t nobody know nothing about making records but him. But the man say, Boy, we ain’t never heard nothing like this before, you even better than Mose. You sure you ain’t got your name on no other contract? I say, No, sir. Well, they say, put your mark right here, cause I tell you, boy, you done made a hit. After that I guess Mose seen he better make the best of it, and he tole them, Oh sure, I teached that boy, he was like a baby to me, which is how I guess all them stories got started. But I never did have no more trouble from Mose until the day he died—which, as it happened, was not very long.

Course I was a full-growed man by then, had kids of my own somewheres. I’d been a rambler and a gambler, worked up the turpentine camps, chopped cotton, worked on the railroad, too, got into a little scrape down around Minden, done just about everything a man could think of and then some, but I always stuck pretty close to home and I always kept my git-tar by my side. Oncet the records started to coming out, though, I was gone, me and that boy they call Wheatstraw, course his real name was Whittacomb, something like that, he just called himself after Peetie Wheatstraw, we jumped all up through Illinois and New Jersey and all up into Canada. Played right out on the streets, people throwed money at us, some of them people had never seen a colored man before. One place, I remember, they had lots of cow farmers up there, I don’t know, might’ve been Wisconsin, them farmers gathered around, and they didn’t even want us to play nothing, just touch our heads and feel our skin, and all the time jabbering away at each other in some foreign language. Other times I just be whomping away on my box, and Wheatstraw blowing harp and popping his eyes out like all get-out and the people laughing and dancing like they never heard nothing like that before.

And sometimes I come home, my mama would have a new man, but most of the time she alone, just waiting on me to return, cause I was always her favorite—and her hair beginning to turn gray, and she just look at me and shake her head and say, Roosevelt, you just look at yourself. Ain’t you never gonna settle down? You just like your daddy, God rest his soul. And then I play her favorite song for her, which she always like to hear me sing till her grave, “So Glad That I Be Back Home,” and the tears come streaming down her cheeks, and she pat me on the head, and she say, You know, you a good boy at heart, but you just ain’t got no Ruler over you. When you all going to quit your foolishness and come home to the church? And I didn’t tell her then, and I ain’t told her yet, that that day ain’t
never
gonna come.

J
ERRY SURVEYED
the material, he went over it again and again in dismay. Trying to sort it out. Trying to make some sense out of it. Trying to determine what was true and what was not. He spoke to Hawk’s sister, Lavalle, an old lady living in a little cabin in Mound Ridge with her daughter. She adjusted the wig she had insisted on putting on before allowing herself to be interviewed. She moistened her lips and poked her mouth around as if she had a set of loosely fitting false teeth, but in truth she had no teeth at all. She cleared her throat and spat out a wad of chewing tobacco, so the tobacco juice dribbled down her chin. Her daughter, Olympia, who looked nearly as old as her mother but was stout where the mother was lean, seemed to have no recollection of Hawk at all. “Of course I wasn’t no more than a baby when he left home, and look at me now.” She laughed a dry old lady’s laugh and sat with her legs comfortably spread under her long gingham dress. “Mama could probably tell you a whole lot about her baby brother, but she don’t remember so good anymore, do you, Mama?” The old lady just smiled. “She remember how her daddy died, though, don’t you?”

“Kilt in a fire. Drove right into a oil truck stopped for a train. They was all burned to a crisp. You could see the smoke for miles, yessir.”

“This was Hawk’s father?” said Jerry. “The gambler?”

“I don’t know nothing about no gambler,” said Olympia. “Oh, he might have played a game of poker or pitty-pat. He just a farmer like everyone else, though, the way I hear tell it. His daddy left him twenty acres, and Mama give it away. To her first husband, y’understand.”

The old lady giggled. “He never gived me no trouble.”

“Y’see, her mind wanders. Sometimes she don’t remember nothing, and sometimes she be clear as a bell. She could tell you a whole lot about them days, if you just catched her right. You know, Mama’s had a hard row to hoe. A hard row to hoe,” said Olympia, shaking her head. “She was such a pretty little thing, too, wasn’t you, Mama? You seen her picture?”

Jerry didn’t even answer before Olympia had waddled inside and come back with two gilt-edged pictures. One showed a lady with flashing eyes, her hair piled up imperially on her head, and a lace mantilla draped across her shoulders. “Well, that my mama’s mama,” she said triumphantly. “Hawk’s mother-?” Olympia nodded. “And this here Mama with her brother Junie, he pass, oh let me see, about ’55,1 think it was.” A young man in a sailor’s uniform stared into the camera straight ahead, hair clipped short, eyes clear and expectant, shoulders squared. The woman beside him was fine-boned and delicate, with a demure scoop-necked dress and a rose in her impeccably waved hair.

“You think Hawk can pick that git-tar, you should’ve heard Junie. Just ask any of the people hereabouts. Course he wouldn’t play nothing but church songs, didn’t think nothing of Hawk nor his music neither. Mama the only one with a soft spot in her heart for her brother, and that because she practically raised him by herself. Everybody else, when he come around they just say, Oh, oh, look like trouble, money, women, something go wrong, somebody after him. Mama just say, he gonna be all right, that boy gonna be all right some day.”

“He meant well,” the old lady suddenly interjected. Jerry nodded encouragingly. “You couldn’t count on him for nothing, though.”

Jerry waited, but nothing else was forthcoming. Well, he supposed she was right, you still couldn’t count on him for much. “Do you ever see him any more?”

“Oncet in a while. We seen him just last month. Didn’t we, Mama?”

The old lady cackled. “He a bad weed, the cows gonna cut him down.”

Jerry confronted Hawk with the discrepancies. They didn’t seem to bother him.

“Olympia don’t know doodly-squat,” he insisted. “Junie poison her mind against me. I got no quarrel with Lavalle, but Junie had a hairy ass. I don’t even like to think of him, I don’t never mention his name. I swear, he could play the git-tar like it was a charm. He never did nothing with it, though. And he never did a honest day’s work in his life, always getting the other niggers to do his work for him, just like a preacher, so smooth and fat and putting on that hincty smile, tell the truth I never did like to admit that he was my brother—course he might’ve said the same. Might’ve been cause we wasn’t natural brothers, but I don’t think so. I seen natural brothers that couldn’t get along for nothing and stepchildren that was as close as white is on rice. I think he was just naturally jealous-hearted cause I was always Mama’s favorite. She wouldn’t hear nothing bad about me. Lavalle tell you anything?”

“Not much,” Jerry admitted.

“Well, then,” said Hawk.

He talked to Mattie Mae, though, Moses wife, who had run off to St. Louis with her husband’s young protege” and then either deserted or been deserted by him there. She was a light-skinned old lady with liver spots on her hands whom he found in a gigantic project in Cleveland. She showed him into a genteel apartment filled to overflowing with bulky plastic-covered furniture, moving with a slow arthritic shuffle while leaning on a cane. She seemed neither pleased nor displeased at this visit, just nodded when he explained that it was through Hawk (actually it was through the Cleveland Housing Authority) that he had gotten her address in the hope that she could tell him something about the old days. From the wall above a padded red leatherette chair pictures of Jesus (light-brown) and Martin Luther King (the same) looked down. On a low table beside the plastic-covered sofa were pictures of three girls—at a graduation ceremony, at a wedding, and on some other formal occasion—and a snapshot of Mattie Mae in a sparkling white nurse’s uniform.

“Well, yes, I suppose it was the way Hawk tells it,” she murmured as she listened to Jerry’s brief account of their tempestuous affair. “I guess he wasn’t no more than fourteen, though he was big for his age. Course I ain’t saying how old I was, that’s a woman’s right, isn’t it?” She smiled coquettishly. “But I was a little older than him, and I had been married to Mr. Chatman for three or four years at that time. But, you know, we women do make mistakes of the heart. I was married to that Mose for no more than six months when I knowed I made a mistake. That Mose was a mean old man. Why, he beat me and whipped me and did things I can’t ever tell another living soul about.” She raised her eyebrows. “And, you know, I was just a little slip of a thing. Not like I am now, all broad and stout, but I had a light-hearted attitude and a girlish figure that I received not a small number of compliments on, if I do say so myself. And of course I loved a good time, that was how I met Mose, and that was how I met Hawk. If it hadn’t been for my willful nature, I would have grown up to be the girl my mama and daddy wanted me to be, but whatever I did I did with my eyes open. See, I used to sneak off to them Saturday-night dances by myself, I always enjoyed a good barbecue or fish fry, I didn’t care if it was rowdy like my mama said or if the people was cutting up all night long. Even after I was married, Mr. Chatman didn’t want me attending none of them parties, cause he said they was too rough for a young woman of my refinement. Shoot, I guess he just wanted to keep me to himself, well, I knowed that, and he didn’t want me running into none of his outside women neither. Course I went anyway, and I guess I seen some things back then that a young girl shouldn’t never see. But, you know, somehow it seemed different being out in the country and all, everybody knowed everybody else, if some child acting bad his parents gonna know about it, not like here. Of course all kinds of terrible things went on, but somehow it just never seemed to bother me. So when Mr. Chatman asked me if I could slip off with him and tie the knot, well my goodness I considered that an honor and a privilege, I imagined that I’d be envied by women in four counties. Little did I know. Mose may have been the best musicianer around, but he sure wasn’t no Loving Dan.” The old lady’s laugh crackled dryly. “Well, see, he’d been to Jackson, he’d been to Natchez, he say he even been as far as Chicago, Illinois, everywhere he go people know who 01’ Man Mose was. So to me, well, I don’t really know how to explain this, it seem foolish to an old woman, but you can’t explain nothing to a young girl who’s got her mind made up, so there wasn’t nothing that would have stopped me, even if I’d known then what I know now.

“Well, I found out my mistake soon enough. Almost too soon. If I could’ve just taken two steps back—but you ain’t never privileged to do that. Not in this life anyhow, and maybe not in the next either. So I suffered along, I bided my time, I went to my mama, but she said, Baby, you done made your bed, now lie in it. And my papa wouldn’t hardly speak to me at all, it just about break my heart, cause he
knew.
And I didn’t have no money, no more good times, uh-uh, Mose practically kept me prisoner, locked the door behind him when he went off to play, cause he had seen what happens by him being what they call a backdoor man—you can hear him going out the back every time that front door slam. Well, that was Mose. I guess you might say that’s just about every musicianer, I was to find out to my sorrow.

“But anyways, I started to notice that there was this young boy coming around, always pestering at Mose to learn him to play git-tar. And he bother Mose and bother Mose so, sometimes Mose just show him something just so’s he can get shut of him, it seemed to me. Anyway he kept coming around and coming around, and then one day I noticed that he was looking at me kind of funny while Mose was showing him a chord. And I didn’t think nothing of it. But one day he came back when Mose wasn’t there at all. And he bang on the door. And I say in my manner, I’m sorry, I can’t let you in, cause Mose took the key. Well, that ain’t gonna stop a young man like Hawk was, so he say, I just be a minute. So he goes around to the rear of the cabin, where there’s a little window just to let in the air, and somehow he squeezed through where no full-grown man could have gone. But he was full-grown, oh my yes, and I knew right then and there that this was the agent of my deliverance. That’s where Mose got the story of the twelve-year-old boy that Elmore stole from him and made such a hit with. Course Hawk wasn’t no twelve years old, but then again I don’t believe he had made fourteen.

“Well, I harped at him and harped at him, and he thought the world of me, but he thought the world of Mose, too, as a blues musician anyway, so it was me, really, leading him on all the time, cause I think he would have been satisfied just to keep squeezing in through that little window, until finally we run off together to St. Louis. We didn’t do much—Lord, it wasn’t for too long—but we was
happy.

“But eventually we drifted apart, like so many young folks do. Because truthfully I was in love with the city, paved streets and streetcar rides, and folks dressing up fancy, and I had it in mind that I wanted to better myself, which is how I came to be a nurse at a later time. But Hawk, I don’t know, I think he got to getting homesick, after all he was just a young boy, and he always say he want to feel that dirt under his feet—I don’t know. Oh my, we was young and foolish then, but I wouldn’t give up my memories for anything in this world.”