“That’s one of Leadbelly’s songs. I heard him once when he first got out of the pen.”
“Who’s Leadbelly?”
“He was in Angola. He’s the man that made a twelve-string guitar.”
“Here’s a card. It will get you in the door tonight,” Hunnicut said.
“Do I get my five dollars back?”
“No, you don’t get it back. Do you want to use one of the electric guitars tonight?”
“I don’t play on no electric guitar,” J.P. said. “It ruins the tone.”
“You got another suit besides that one?”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing. It looks fine.”
“Let him wear a pair of overalls,” one of the other men said.
“Don’t mind Troy,” Hunnicut said. “He’s got a mouth disease. It don’t know when to stay shut.”
Troy was a member of Hunnicut’s show. He was from back-of-town Memphis, and he had black marcelled hair, sideburns, a high oil-slick forehead, and gold plating around the edges of his teeth. His lean jaws worked slowly as he chewed a piece of gum. The man with him was named Seth. He was tall and he had coarse brown hair like straw, and his face was scarred from smallpox. The skin was deeply pockmarked and reddened, and there was a scent of whiskey on his breath.
“I got something for you to sign,” Hunnicut said. “This is just a talent show and you don’t get paid. If you win you appear on the Louisiana Jubilee, and then we’ll talk about a salary. Seth and Troy will be on the show tonight, but they’re not in the contest.”
He gave J.P. a release to sign. J.P. put his signature at the bottom in pencil in large awkward letters.
“What’s your full name?” Hunnicut said.
“That’s it.”
“Your initials stand for something, don’t they?”
“J.P. is my name, mister. I ain’t got no other.”
“Where are you from?” Troy, the man with the black marcelled hair, said.
“Up north of here by the Arkansas line.”
“All right, boy. You’re all set to go. We’ll see you this evening,” Hunnicut said.
J.P. picked up his guitar case and left the audition room.
“You figure he come to town on a mule?” Troy said.
“He’s going to do all right,” Hunnicut said.
“You ain’t going to let him win?”
“He’s the man.”
“He’s a hillbilly.”
“You want to know something? I’ll tell you why you’ll never be anything but a dime and nickel picker in somebody’s troupe. Because you got no idea of what it takes to get on top of the pile. You either got to know how to act like a hick and make the real hicks think you’re as stupid as they are, or if you’re a real hick you got to have somebody with brains enough behind you to make the other hicks think like you want them to. The way to make money from hicks is to sell them a hick. And that boy is just what they want.”
“He’s still got fertilizer on his shoes,” Troy said.
J.P. crossed the street and walked towards the hotel. He had rented a room without a bath in the older part of the business district. The hotel was an ugly three-story building with rusted fire escapes and one wall had been blackened by a fire. He took his key from the desk clerk and went upstairs.
The room had a musty odor to it. He turned on the ceiling fan and opened the window. He leaned on the sill and looked down into the street. He saw the cotton exchange and the sample bales wrapped in brown paper and partially torn open and stacked by the side entrance; there were drygoods stores, a Negro peddler selling fruit from a wagon, groups of men in overalls and seersucker suits who talked and chewed tobacco and spit over the curbing, women in cotton-print dresses looking through the store windows at the cheap machine-made merchandise, and the late afternoon sun beat down on the asphalt and filled the air with a hot, humid odor. A man who had his legs amputated at the knees sat propped against one of the buildings with a hat in his hand. There were several pencils in the hat. People passed him by without notice, some looked at him in curiosity, one woman dropped a coin into his hat. He sat on a board platform with small metal wheels underneath. He rolled himself along the sidewalk by pushing with his hands against the pavement. J.P. watched him disappear around the corner. He turned away from the window and lay down on the bed.
He took out his guitar and drew his thumb slowly across the strings. Sometimes he used a beer cap for a pick as the cotton field workers did who used to play guitar in the juke joints on the edge of town. He had first liked music as a small boy when he used to sit on the levee in the late evening down by the nigger graveyard and listen to the funeral marches and see the sweating faces in the glow of pine fagots and hear the music that seemed to tell the sorrow of an entire race.
He wanted to write a song. It would contain all the things he felt inside him. It would have the sadness he saw in the country around him, the feeling of the niggers singing in the fields, it would be like the songs they sang on the work gangs and in the Salvation Army camps, or like sitting on the back porch alone, watching the rain fall on the young cotton.
He went down the hall to bathe and dress. At six o’clock he left the hotel and walked to the city auditorium where the contest was being held. The stores had closed and there were few people on the street. He passed the movie house and saw the man with the amputated legs on his wood platform off to one side of the entrance holding his hat and pencils in his hand. The beggar smelled of wine and dried sweat. The buttons of his shirt were gone and his bony chest showed. The theater manager asked him to move farther down the street; he was in the way of the people who wanted to go to the show.
J.P. went to the back door of the auditorium and gave the doorman his card. It was crowded back stage. He saw Hunnicut and Troy talking in the wings.
“Evening,” he said.
“Hi boy, how’s it going?” Hunnicut said, then shouted at one of the prop men, “You got the lights out of place — over there, no, I said over there.” He turned back to J.P. and Troy. “I got to do everybody’s job for them. Go show him where to put the lights, Troy. I should fire the whole goddamn crew of them.”
“Where am I supposed to go?” J.P. said.
“Let’s get you another suit of clothes first.”
“My suit don’t have nothing to do with playing guitar.”
“Hey, Seth, get over here.”
Seth was talking with a short, well-formed brunette.
“Take him into Troy’s dressing room and find him some clothes,” Hunnicut said.
“You sure Troy don’t mind?”
“To hell with Troy. Get Winfield a suit that don’t look like a piece of canvas.”
They walked behind the sets to the dressing room. Seth took a gray sports suit from the closet and laid it over the chair. The pockmarks in his face showed more deeply in the artificial light of the room. He took a pint bottle out of his coat pocket and unscrewed the cap. He drank out of the bottle while J.P. dressed.
“You want a shot?” he said.
“Thanks. You reckon I got a chance tonight?”
“You’ll be all right.”
“I spent my last few dollars to come to town.”
“Virdo will give you a job. You’re real good on a twelve-string.”
“Who’s Virdo?” J.P. said.
“It’s Hunnicut’s first name, but he don’t like nobody to call him by it.”
“Is that girl you were with in the show?”
“Yeah. She sings some. Mostly she’s out there to give the farmers something to look at. I never could get no place with her. She gives it to Troy pretty steady. He can have it, though. She’s on the powder. Mainline stuff.”
“You know some girls around town?”