Finally he asked Kiki to help.
“Just listen to me,” he said. “I’m a storyteller. Storyteller need somebody wanna hear what he got to tell.”
Eleven
“I run into RL at harvest time in Areola, Mississippi. He told me t’come on later and join’im, but by the time I got there he was already at work, playin’ his guitar. He was playin’ a new song like I never heard the blues played before. It was his own words and they was somethin’, but I didn’t care ’bout the words at first. I was moved by his wild voice and the way he th’owed his head back like somethin’ in’im might break if he didn’t holler it off with a song. He was like some righteous Baptist minister rapt in prayer. Not that religious folk would ever claim ole RL an’ his devil music.” Soupspoon turned to Kiki and winked. She’d come home with a bucket of fried chicken, a six-pack, and a quart of Jack Daniel’s. She laid out the feast on the dining table and sat down, all attention.
“He was a skinny boy,” Soupspoon continued, “with one good eye and one dead one that floated in its socket. With that dead eye they said he could see past all what we see, into hell — where everyone knows the blues come from anyways.
“His hands was like angry spiders up and down them guitar strings. No two men could play what RL, Bob LeRoy, Robert Johnson could play. He was a field nigger too lazy to pull cotton. He was scarred and scared and smallish. He loved his momma an’ almost ev’ry other woman he ever met.
“But like I was sayin’, it was late in the day an’ there wasn’t too many people out ‘cause it was cotton-choppin’ time in Mississippi an’ all the colored folks was workin’ except for me an’ RL an’ maybe five or seven lazy souls like us.
“I remember four nappy-headed boys and a old man called Crawdaddy an’ two young girls. The girls was Linda Powell and Booby Redman. The boys was all stampin’ they feet an’ noddin’ they agreement with what RL sang. An’ old Crawdaddy shook his shoulders like he was a young man again, ready to get out on the dance floor or pull down his terrible Texas jackknife.
“It was like hurricane weather that day, both warmish and cool, with a wind comin’ up from the Gulf and mockingbirds wheelin’ across the sky at every note.
“At first he played ‘Love in Vain’ but it was when RL sung ‘Me and the Devil’ that Booby’s jaw dropped down. She had on a plain cotton dress with a bright red rag across her head. She was a healthy girl with upstandin’ bosom and sturdy legs, but when she heard RL her jaw hung open and her hands dangled down at her side. By the time RL told us that his evil soul would catch the Greyhound I thought that Booby might just fall down and cry.
“That boy could play the clothes right off a woman’s back.”
“By the Rolling Stones?” Kiki asked.
“What?”
“‘Love in Vain,‘ isn’t that the same song that the Rolling Stones did?” Kiki was all excitement and grins.
“Girl, do you wanna let me tell this here story or do you wanna ask all kindsa stupid questions?”
Kiki took a wing from the bucket of fried chicken and puckered her lips into an air-blown kiss for her friend.
“Now, where was I?” Soupspoon asked. “Oh yeah, we was out on the street. RL stamped his hard soles and sung new blues. I mean he was playin’ music that nobody ever heard before, he was makin’ history right there in front’a our eyes. The people come, more and more, and the nickels fall into his old bean can. When there was enough of a crowd I went across the street and took out my own guitar. I was just sixteen but you know I could play.
“Bluesmen in the Delta liked to play both sides of the street. It made us kind of a spectacle that the country Negroes wanted to see. And it didn’t hurt too much if you was on the road an’ you had somebody willin’ t’jump in if some field hand got mad at the way you made his girl laugh.
“I guess RL’s music was too much for Booby, because she come across the street, really it was just a graded dirt road, to hear my soft sweet blues. Satan wasn’t after me. That’s why I’m still here in the flesh.
“That was a day to remember. It was the end of a hard day in the fields. People was so tired that they fingers dragged in the dust, but they still come to see what everybody else was doin’. Even the sky was curious. Big ole fat clouds rushed over and then passed for a glimmer of sunshine that would blind for a minute. People was yellin’, ‘Play it!’ an’ ‘All right!’ Some of the girls was mo vin’ they feet and the boys was soon to dance with’em because back then when a woman got the urge to dance she was serious. If her boyfriend didn’t wanna dance she’d take her another man by the hand. That’s just the way it was.
“We played and played. The nickels fell like hail. Everybody was movin’ to RL’s evil moods. And when they got tired they’d come over to me an’ I’d sooth’em with songs like ‘Got Me a Country Girl’ or ‘Blind Catfish Blues.’
“There must’a been forty people listenin’ an’ dancin’ to me and Bob. Forty poor-as-the-day-they-was-born colored souls. We was higher than a holy roller’s shout when the county sheriff come up.
“Heck Wrightson was a white man big as two men and meaner than a hungry rat down yo’ pants. He threw his billy stick on the wood sidewalk so that it rolled and clattered on the slats. He called out, ‘Everybody better hit the ground by the time that stick stop rollin’ ‘cause I’m shootin’ waist-high.’
“Booby was the first one to scream. Then black folk started runnin’ with they heads down and they hands up. Colored souls piled one on the other, and Heck was true to his word. He held a forty-one-caliber pistol at his beltline and squeezed off shots at a leisurely pace.
“POW! Bang! Heck was smilin’. Linda Powell hit the ground with this loud humph! I seen’er boyfriend, Lyle Cross, run away from her an’ go ‘round the general store
“I was in a awful state ‘cause of my guitar, which I had received from my Uncle Fitzhew and which I named Bannon after my murdered friend. I couldn’t just th’ow it down or run wild with it. So I tried to lower myself down off the side of the wood walkway. People was still yellin’ an’ runnin’ an’ I was leanin’ over the side, prayin’ t’God that I’d save my life along with my guitar.
“Then there was this hard boot next to my head.
“‘Git up from there, nigger,’ the boot said. An’ I knew right then that Heck Wrightson had got me.
“I look up an’ seen Heck towerin’. That ugly gun muzzle looked back down at me. With his other hand Heck had RL by the scruff of his shirt
“The look on Bob’s face spoke the whole history of Mississippi colored life. RL was a brash young man and he was conceited and wild. But when that lawman grabbed him he just slumped down and took it. His good eye was starin’ out beyond the dirt road and his bad one searched a thousand miles further on. Even his lips sagged. Because when a white man, especially a lawman, grabbed a nigger, that was all she wrote. If you gave him any trouble or any mouth, or if you stood up straight and looked him in the eye — if you did any’a them things there, death waitin’, death just as quick as my momma’s biscuits.
“Heck dragged us down to the white barbershop where his uncle extracted teeth and cut hair. They kept a cell in the back. It was just a closet with a cast-iron doorframe that sported five metal bars. But it wasn’t much of a jail. They didn’t even have bars on the li’l window but we had enough sense not to try an’ get away.
“Bob sat himself down in the corner like he had been punished at school. He sat on the floor, because there wasn’t no furniture or even a stool in the room. The only thing there was was a tin pail that smelt powerfully of sour vomit and shit.