Mason's father, I'll have you know, wasn't a janitor for anybody—ever. Something too inconsistent in Mason's collage, back there: those shifting contradictory images. They disturb me. Chiro may have had his fingers in many pies, a thumb or two dripped (dipped in) blood, perhaps. Surely he was a peccadillo, maybe a chiseler but he was not inconsistent. It's Mason who's… Ellis Sir met the world bravely, without tosh. No rift in his life: nothing was rubber-stamped; everything done in the original. Why do I defend his father and damn him? (Well, you heard the phoney voice in the previous chapter!) Mason's father, for example, often walked — he did not use his, uh, wings or Cadillac to show off. I can see him now: he's walking along Peach Street in Atlanta. It's early morning. He looks distastefully at his surroundings. Yet he is unable to leave. He projects himself into another time, another place: the cobblestones beneath his uneasy feet are slick from too many years of slime, blood of bull-runs, urine. Here he's not full of the “B.V.D. Blues,” but a respected Model of Virtue, perhaps a doctor, a man of trust. All his life Mason's father has thought the word father and now it breaks down into two parts: “fat” and “her.” Is a father hiding the female her in himself? Another view: he's riding a bicycle high on a tightrope… Mason's father willed his wings to Mason. Remember the escape? They were made of mutation itself, of conviction, and of impeccable iron feathers. And here is Mason's fat-her as Red Charleston with a history of backdooring, listening to Duke Ellington in Kansas City directing his band through “Chocolate Shake.” Cats outside in the alley gambling, [a passage between buildings — not a path through a lovely garden, this alley]. Many of the lames in the turnout are talking trash; trotters angling for attention. Duke keeps on keeping on. Up there — big smile. It's Saturday night: somebody feels mellow, somebody else feels deadly. Frankie and Johnnie meet C.C. Rider. Coppers are pulling coats, police swinging billysticks. Some up on china white, others down on sneaky pete. Mason's father was a music lover who danced a trickbag step to Louis Jordan, to Benny Carter and his Chocolate Dandies ripping through “Cadillac Slim”: splib-oh-do-be-ooop, bob-bop-ah-do-ooop… Chiro understood the Body by Fisher. Saturday night: the lights are still greasy from the baptized bird. All around Mason's father a hawk flapped and stabbed. He did the Cootie Crawl, too. He moved through honkytonk changes, buying drinks for unemployed dudes, hot mamas, Kants. Completely qualified, folks. Another shot of Mason's father: in buckskin. “Got my gun, got my hoss.” He takes off with Cab Calloway toward the sunrise in one of those twenty-five minute colored shorts. He told stories of genocide and mass murder around the campfire. He worked the chain-gang, helped to build Atlanta. Chiro poured the cement like sperm. The wheels of automobiles stuck to the shadows of churches. Chiro's mother was a preacher in one of those churches, his father — a jailbird, a heel grifter, a lady-killer. He was not exactly a dangerous nightwalker but he knew them all — knew which pockets concealed their knives, their smokers; knew the crooked cops, the ladies on the lookout, the secrets of them all. Chiro hung out at card parties and Saturday night fish fries. Did the Lindy. Chased chippies. Was a cherry picker. Did the Chitterlin' Strut. Could even sing Indian rain songs. (Indians were part of his heritage, too. So were the people shipped here from the prisons of England.) Cab taught him to sing “Chop Chop Charlie Chan.” Chiro strutted around in a zoot suit and quoted the scriptures better than a country preacher. Was perfectly at home in any schizophrenic city — especially Atlanta. Even his pain was sort of sweet: “Sickness and Benny Goodman's Sextet.” “Buttermilk and Fats Waller.” “Neckbones and riverbeds of garbage.” Mason's father didn't come from the Broken Hill in Australia, never walked in the tides of the Coral Sea: he was of the place where streetfights and cockfights reigned. Here is an easy early snapshot of Mason's father: fingernails neatly cut and polished; felt hat at rakish angle; no scar, no conk, no smell of Okefenokee, red dirt, not even Cadillac grease, perfume, Royal Crown. A cat rejected by the World War Two draft board, he was a sharpshooter. Some swore he had one eye, nine fingers. At least one lady called him Mack the Knife, one other Fisheye. But they were both confused. At the point of orgasm, one lady grabbed his Saturday Night Special from its place tucked in his pants at the base of his spine and pulled the trigger — she was that excited. The bullet went through the mattress and lodged in the rattan carpet beneath the bed. He bit her neck till he got blood. Yet this witches' brew was not his thing. He could do the Twist. Had no real use for the Frenzy — untying the knot. Mason's mother wrote this historic letter to his father in March, 1941: “You are a beast. You had your son by the hand, remember, and his steps equalled one-fourth of each of yours on that hot dirt road in an uncertain place where the Cadillac broke down. You always walked too fast. And your daughter: what of her? Haven't you betrayed her, too? I'm not surprised that the woman in the passing car gave you a ride into town and
her car broke down, too: You're just bad luck, Mister. You got the ‘Dipper Mouth Blues,’ and you look like a forkbeard two days out of water. I remember many nights when I didn't want it and you forced me: I hate you for raping me. Good-bye, Melba.” Although Chiro was a conscious dresser, he never wore gold suspenders and tap-dancing shoes (although, in The Memoirs of Madame Rose Marie Butler Williams, Grande Queen of The Best Time in Town Bar and Hotel on Butler Street, Chiro did wear shoelaces made of gold thread.) Near the end of his life, Mason's father ate regularly in the restraurant he once owned. The lady next door always tried to get him to go to church with her. He never did. So she gave him church flowers she brought from the altar. He was by now an old man bent low in his dim room. No other person ever entered it. It was crammed with the bad odor of an old man who smoked too much, whose wings were damaged and musty…