Summer 2007
Till Death Do Us Part in the Delta: A Mississippi Odyssey
Morgan City, Mississippi--The Delta isn’t pretty by picture postcard
standards. Desolation and despair lick every stick and brick of human
habitation. Creeping vines choke abandoned shacks, the tendrils of
nature reclaiming the detritus of culture. The suffocating flatness
stretches as far as the eye can see. It’s a lonesome lick of land that
looks like it was lifted whole out of a parched African plain and
dropped in Mississippi by mistake.
But the swamps wear a haunting iridescent coat of green, and even in
late November, unpicked cotton balls dangle in the fields like orphaned
slow flakes. Churned up by the foaming mouths of the Yazoo and
Mississippi rivers, this soggy triangle effused the Blues, that
bittersweet blend of half-remembered griot chants and plantation field
hollers filtered through the parched throats and plucked on the broken
heartstrings of the sons of slaves. A moaned anthem of survival,
whetted with whiskey, lust, anger, anguish and longing, the Blues are
the half brother of Jazz and granddaddy of rock n’ roll, and, arguably,
America’s greatest homegrown musical gift to the world.
Driving through Morgan City—an abbreviated urban sprawl of bare cinder
block dwellings and immobilized mobile homes that never quite got
started—I pulled into a combination gas station-convenience store. Two
bone-thin, old black men sat out front gently rocking on straw settees
not originally meant for motion. They suddenly stopped rocking and
turned their heads as one as I climbed out of the car, wary of my white
face like an invading chess piece from the far side of the board.
“Pardon me,” I said, pained to be the cause of their distress, “I’m
looking for the grave of Robert Johnson.”
They stared back in stony silence, two black knights holding the fort.
“Ro-bert John-son,” I enunciated clearly, lest my Yankee accent be the
problem, “I heard he’s buried hereabouts.”
They looked me over hard and long. “You done come too late, Mister,”
the one with a tick in his right eye finally spoke up, “the hearse
rolled by ‘bout ‘n hour ago.”
I couldn’t tell if I was being ribbed, riled or just plain
misunderstood.
“You can try’n catch up with ‘em at the graveyard if they ain’t done
diggin’ yet,” the other man tried to console me.
“I don’t believe we’re talking about the same man,” I said, choking
back an involuntary chuckle.
“Ain’t but one Robert Johnson in Morgan City,” my first informant
fired back, his right eye ticking up a storm, “’n he be bound for
kingdom come by now!”
“I beg your pardon,” I replied, “I mean the bluesman who’s been dead
and gone for decades.”
At this point, a third man, who’d been listening in from behind a torn
screen door, hollered, “I’ll tell ya where he laid to rest, Mister, if
you buy me a beer.”
I was thirsty myself and happy to oblige with beers all around.
“He a legend after his life!” the third man nodded.
I raised my can in a proposed toast: “To the King of the Delta Blues.”
“It be white man music now,” he flashed me a canny cross between a
chuckle and a smirk, “they done bleached out the black ‘n milked out
the blue.” Laughter leaked through the gaps in his teeth. “But my man,
he hoodwinked the Grim Reaper, split his self in two so nobody’d never
track him down. They had to go ‘n bury him twice.”
The sun was sinking in the sky and Robert Johnsons were multiplying by
the minute.
Finally fathoming whom I meant, the two men on the straw settees had a
difference of opinion. The one with the tick in his right eye insisted
he was buried “out by Mount Zion just up the road, not the first
turn-off, but the second, betwixt the three-wheeled trailer and the
tar-topped barn.”
“As God is my witness,” the second man solemnly shook his head, “his
bones be laid to rest at the Payne Chapel Missionary Church in Quito.”
Now the third man grinned triumphant: “Ain’t none o’ you knows the
truth. He ‘as poisoned back o’ Three Forks to Quito, ‘n funeralized at
Payne Chapel alright, but his sistah, she had him dug up again ‘n laid
in at Mt. Zion, closer to home.”
Reticent as I was to take sides, I only had time for one tomb.
Chasing the setting sun down Highway 7, as directed, turning right onto
a nameless dirt road between the three-wheeled trailer and the
tar-topped barn, I soon found Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church, a
little white clapboard chapel that rose suddenly out of the swamp. It
was a peaceful last resting place for a man who had, according to
legend, learned his guitar licks from the Devil himself in exchange for
his soul.
I sat in the car, with a CD in the slot and a ghost growling, groaning,
crooning and clowning, laughing at fortune and moaning at fate,
mercilessly tickling guitar strings to a stride, strut, syncopated
counterpoint or bottleneck slide, as needed, more like a composite
choir and band than a lonesome solo, singing:
“The blue-u-u-u-ues
is a low-down shakin’ chill
You ain’t never had ‘em, I
hope you never will…”
I listened hard, trying to conjure up the face of that black Rimbaud,
narrating his own protracted season in hell:
“Umm mmm mmm mmm
blues fallin’ down like hail
blues fallin’ down like hail
And the days keeps on worryin’ me
there’s a hellhound on my trail
Hellhound on my trail…”
Lost in musical reverie, I didn’t notice a car that pulled up
alongside.—“You in any kind of trouble?” The young black man at the
wheel, his wife beside him and two little boys in the back seat, all
eyed me with a mix of curiosity and suspicion.
“I’ve come to pay my respects to the memory of a great man,” I said to
set their minds at rest, remembering the unsolved rash of black church
burnings several summers ago.
“It’s alright, Mister, you can go on it!.” the driver nodded and drove
off.
A gray granite obelisk, oddly Egyptian looking for a cenotaph plunked
in Mississippi mud, immediately stood out among the tombstones. Graced
on one side with a grinning five and dime store snapshot, “You may bury
my body/down by the highway side,” it said on the second side; and the
third was covered with the titles of songs listed in bold capital
letters like great victories on a war memorial: LOVE IN VAIN, LITTLE
QUEEN OF SPADES, HELLHOUND ON MY TRAIL, ME AND THE DEVIL BLUES, et al.
Behind the obelisk, a little off to the left, I noticed a freshly dug
grave. Leaning in for a look, the somberness of the locale
notwithstanding, I had to laugh. A hand-scrawled card on a pike
identified the final resting place of Robert Johnson, the other Robert
Johnson.
Peter
Wortsman is a writer in
multiple modes, including fiction (A Modern Way to Die, 1991), drama
("The Tattooed Man Tells All," 2000, and "Burning Words," 2005),
artists book (it-t=i, 2005), travel writing (for numerous print
publications and websites) and translation. Peter Wortsman's latest
work is a translation from the German of Heinrich Heine's classic book
of travel reflections, Travel Pictures, forthcoming from Archipelago
Books in 2008.
Once upon a time when music still rattled my bones, I moonlighted as
co-editor of Sing Out! The Folksong Magazine. Of all musical
traditions, the Blues mattered most. They seemed to issue straight
from the spleen-never mind the heart. And of all the bluesmen and
women, Robert Johnson cut most sharply to the quick, mingling
poetry, pluck and a plaintive wail. So when a chance assignment for
a medical magazine took me down to Jackson, Mississippi, to
interview a specialist in sleep disorders and I had a free
afternoon, I stepped on the gas and drove into the marshy dreamland
of the Delta to pay my respects to the King.