Long Time Leaving (41 page)

Precious little pathos there, and no vindictive overkill: he got her off, and then he ran off. To do something stupid and destructive. She's got him nailed, all right, but coolly.

Minnie's “Killer Diller Blues” is like that song Carly Simon sang some years ago, “You're So Vain,” but more sportive. It doesn't seem to imply resentment or hurt on her part—if anything she seems tickled by her target. She can make fun of a man in a wonderfully unsticky way, calling him an “awful little creature” for three verses and then letting him say it for himself:

In life, Minnie got pretty fair use out of men, considering. Instru-mentally and vocally, her duets with each husband are more than the sum of their parts. “Me and My Chauffeur Blues,” which she recorded with Little Son Joe in 1941 (he got the writing credit, but that conferred no monetary value, and she undoubtedly wrote their songs), is a bit of romantic realism: she likes the way he drives so much, she's going to buy him a Ford V-8 in order to corner his services. It's the same tune as the blues standard “Good Mornin’ Little School Girl,” which Sonny Boy Williamson recorded four years earlier, but the latter's lyrics are about seduction of a minor. (“Tell your mama 'n’ your papa, I'm a little school-
boy, too.”) Minnie's song is more even-handed. “Going to let my chauffeur …drive me around the world,” she sings, with considerably more tenderness than usual in her tone. “Then he can be my little boy, yes, I'll be his girl.” It may be noteworthy, though the Garons don't note it, that Memphis Minnie never had children. She recorded this song with the significant other of her middle and declining years, Little Son Joe.

“I'm so glad,” Minnie sings, “that I ain't nobody's tool.” Capitalist nor paranoiac-critical. Many a song by her is sharp enough to be Kafka's ax for the frozen sea inside us. The ax that the Garons have to grind is some other, duller, one.

To me, blues music doesn't seem so exotic that it requires recourse to France. It may be surreal, but it's not trying to be. It's not surreal
ist.
I'm talking about the blues back before the sixties, back before blues-esque folkies and rock idols started coming on like shamans with disdain for the mundane. At its roots, the blues isn't jaded. It's as pretty as it can be, under the circumstances.

But that's just my theory, which is no doubt conditioned as much as anybody else's is by what I need from the blues. The Garons assert that “white critics and fans cannot bear the thought that the blues singers often despise them, and see them, correctly, as the architects or at least the accomplices of so much of the squalor in which they are forced to live.” And I think of biscuits. I want to believe that in Memphis Minnie's later years, after she's settled down some (haven't we all?), but before she's had the strokes (knock on wood), I get a chance to visit her at home, with some whiskey. We hit it off. She serves me some of the (literal) biscuits she was famous for among those who knew her. Biscuits just crusty enough, I imagine, to hold in the steam that comes when you open them to put in butter. And I get from her what nobody else ever did: the story of her life.

I don't see it as coming out squalid. I've just been listening over and over, and over, and over, to the five different takes of a never-released song Minnie recorded with Little Son Joe in 1946. By then she was forty-nine and he had been her mate for ten years or so. They would live together till he died in 1961. “The Man I Love” is a challenge to decipher, but here is the gist:

She is with a man whose “hair is turning grey. He understands life, no time to waste away. We get together and talk it over, the life we want to live. Hold my hand and talk love—boy, oh boy, what a thrill.” Then comes a line which, in all its variations and conceivable readings, might be “Our hard life together throws Mama off her smile,” or it might be
“Our hardly-together throes this summer offer smiles.” Or maybe “Of us holding together through this hobble-off-us mile.” Or “Of us heartily together though it's horrible, awful. Smile.” Or “Our holding together threw the bubble off Ismail.” Or my personal preference: “Of our hearts late to gather this hardly obvious smile.”

Not obvious, no, but not surreal either. And the next line, clear and consistent in every take: “Well I have found a friend, have made my life worthwhile.” Then a line that goes something like this: “Well the new year step in, I believe I'll do right awhile.” And finally, “The man I love treat me like an angel child.” Or in another version, “I have found me a baby, treat me like a baby child.”

They say she threw whiskey in Little Son Joe's eyes when she saw him sitting with other women, would even turn evil on him while they were playing—“She'd work Son Joe over right on the bandstand, right in front of the whole audience. Bang, bop, boom, bop! Ha, ha,” recalled Johnny Shines. They also say she was faithful to him—people wondered how he held on to a beautiful woman like her—and she looked after him when he was old and sick.

She would wrangle with fellow musicians over money or how the music ought to be played—she even got to where she would badmouth her old friend Broonzy. But according to a mutual friend, “Big Bill would never do anything unless'n he called Minnie. ‘Let me call Minnie on the phone and see what she say about it,’ he'd say. And she'd say, Aww …well, all right, Bill …I'll come over …I'll see,’ in her gruff way. But she would come over because she was big in her heart, even though she could be rough.” She was a tough mother for you.

And for herself. So many musical icons have burnt out before they had a chance to grow up. I have had the opportunity to ask two great American musicians the following question: “Why do you think you didn't die young?” Ray Charles said, “Well, I know you've heard about me, I did a lot of things. But when you're blind, you have enough trouble getting home, without getting blind drunk. And I never got so fucked up I couldn't go on stage and sing ‘I Can't Stop Loving You.’ ” Willie Nelson said, “I guess I was too chickenshit to ever entirely self-destruct.” I think Memphis Minnie might have answered that question in her song “In My Girlish Days”:

Neither her seducer nor her parents can tell her what to make of herself. She is who she is, though willing to learn, and she knows it. She isn't singing for sympathy, nor is she preening her bad self, as I am inclined to suspect Salvador Dalí was. When she saw some comforting, everyday thing to be doable, like being half of an old married couple, she believed in it. She could get some satisfaction.

I
thought I'd run into a lot of flak, promoting my unidolatrous Robert E. Lee biography in the South, but even at “Washington and Lee, where he died while serving as the college's president, folks were quite receptive. At his birthplace, a young woman reporter did ask if I considered myself an honorable person, and remained skeptical after I said that I did, yes, but not in the ante- or even the postbellum sense. And in a Louisville bookstore an older woman told me, “I am a descendant of General John Hunt Morgan, and I want you to know the Confederates were not fighting for slavery.”

“Okay,” I said, “what were they fighting for?”

“Freedom,” she said.

“Freedom to do what?”

“Freedom to decide whether to have slavery or not.”

I do what I can to keep my finger on the pulse of evolving Southern culture. At this very moment, I am sitting out a spell of bad weather in “Wakulla County, Florida, where I go fishing every year. The
Wakulla News
reports that “a local painter who sold his work on the roadside was found not guilty of obscenity in a jury trial last week.”

Brent Stevens, the painter, had set up “a roadside stand selling ‘Hot boiled art’ at the intersection of U.S. Highway 319 and Bloxham Cutoff …One of Stevens’ more controversial works was a reimagining of
The Last Supper
with a female Christ figure. That painting showed a man and woman in an embrace at one end of the table and a nude woman at the other end of the table.”

The reason the art was marketed as “boiled,” of course, is that other roadside stands in the area advertise hot boiled peanuts. I love boiled peanuts. In that regard, I'm hard-core son of the South.

But when I discovered that the publisher of my Robert E. Lee book, Penguin, had sent out copy identifying me as “the quintessential Southern commentator,” I objected strenuously. Maybe I'm the only Southerner Penguin could think of, so I was bound to be quintessential. Or
maybe Penguin thought they had come up with an expression that would sound so pretty to Southern book buyers that what it might mean wouldn't matter.

The copy also said my book would appeal to “proud Southerners.” Oh, man. Don't people in the Northeast realize anything? I move up there for the civil liberties, and I make it plain that I'm not a shameful nor a shame-faced Southerner, but in fact you could pretty much say that I moved up here to get away from people who enjoy putting themselves forward as proud Southerners, and I spend five years off and on—way, way more than would have been cost-effective—trying to get a sufficiently skeptical yet sufficiently sympathetic handle on the quintessential Southern icon (an attribution that, to give him credit, would have made him shudder), I finally produce a book that I feel pretty good about but that in fact is bound to piss “proud Southerners” off, and my publisher sends out promotional literature one glance at which will cause the sort of reader this book needs to say “Ick.”

“Well, it's marketing,” Penguin told me.

Like “it's Chinatown,” in the movie of that name. You don't want to inquire into what goes on there, regular human scruples don't apply.

Maybe I should have gone with the flow, set myself up in earnest as the q.S.c. on the side of the highway, if necessary.

Nope. These days, I'd have to become a Republican, and that I will not do.

I'm not too honorable to hustle a book I wrote, but I do have a hard time getting into an unconflictedly hustling state of mind. Ideally, you would go around talking about your book on the radio and TV and in bookstores and so on before it's too late. That is to say, at a point when you can still fix it. By the time the publisher does send you out on a promotional tour, the book is a published widget, and there have already been a couple of reviews, favorable or unfavorable, that miss the point of it, and you sort of hate to pull off the bandages and reopen the creative process, because it's almost healed over now, what's the point; but you do. You start telling people about your product, so they'll buy it, and the next thing you know, in your own mind, it's back in development.

Sometimes this is because you get so tired of talking about your book
over and over that you begin to make up a version of it that is fresh enough to pique your own interest. Say you're William Faulkner being interviewed on drive-time radio about
As I Lay Dying.

Never mind. I'm not saying he couldn't have done it, though he did have that squeaky little speaking voice more befitting the postal clerk that he was, incidentally, than the epic progenitor he was down inside.

I'm saying he wouldn't. You would have had to shoot him before he would go around the country trying to explain, repeatedly, to drive-time radio hosts and bookstore audiences of three, what in the world inspired him to write about people trying to get their mama, in her coffin, to her ancestral burial ground by way of a swollen river.

Have you read that book lately? My God, what a book that is; it comes at you like a family of strangers, everybody all this-side-that-a-way and in the middle of things, blown in through your kitchen window by a hurricane. That is a book by a man who wasn't concerned with marketing. That is a book by a man who thought of the writing and the consequent reading as the primary transaction.

But it isn't anymore, marketing is, and presumably the author who doesn't promote doesn't stay in business, which is what I want to do until I die—even though I know in my soul it is generally better for your self-esteem to have a book in you than to have it brought out.