John Henry Days (36 page)

He starts into “Queen of Spades” and sizes up the couples. It’s his first night in Chicago and he falls to custom and looks for the ugliest woman in the room. There’s rarely any difficulty in finding her: the ugliest woman in a room stands out, like the tallest tree or the biggest rock. She makes a stark jagged outline against the rest of her sex, a landmark of homeliness. In small towns he sings and looks around the establishment (a timber concoction rotting on stilts over a swamp, a tin-walled jook joint shivering on lonely road)
for flaw until he finds rickety teeth, all-gum smiles, lazy eyes, or hair like a spiderweb. He’ll make eye contact with the woman (her lazy eye makes him cock his head, which the audience takes for some performance tic) and sings the next song, “Sweet-Hearted Woman,” to her, tossing each word to her like roses. Thorns flicked off one by one. Everyone else in the room recedes until she understands—first in mad glee, then incredulously, finally in rapture— that it is just her and him, he’s singing about her sweet heart. No man has ever loved her as he does now (those goddamned honey eyes of his, he knows how to make his eyes goddamned and honey), and when the song ends she fears that it is the dim light in the saloon that has saved her, created a spell over him that will dissolve once the set is over and he sees her close up. She has developed techniques over the years to mask nature’s imperfections: urged by stares and coarse comments she tends to look at the ground when someone addresses her, mumbles to prevent viewing of the teeth knocked out by her mother some years before, and is wholly and keenly aware when eyes flit over defect and then swiftly shift away. But the singer lifts her chin in his rough palm after the set and coos. His songs did not lie. He is a special human being and can see what the rest of the world cannot, that she is good and decent and has much love to give to the one who discovers her treasure.

A survival tactic for a far-roaming and rolling man like himself that suggested itself one night in Mississippi when his eyes sailed out into the audience and immediately wrecked on a reef of monstrous titties, titties of such abundant rightness that the botched face of the woman they were attached to did not perturb him. He couldn’t get past the titties. He imagined her aureoles, counted each immaculate bump, they swirled and orbited around the nipple like faithful retainers. He didn’t see her face at all and later that night when his mouth was pressed between her breasts and he could barely breathe he realized from her wetness and greed for him that she hadn’t been laid in a long time. She was grateful. Conceiving in that moment his plan to find the ugliest woman in the audience. A simple matter of practicality. They were grateful and eager to please. They never had a man who was liable to cut him or send him running out the bedroom window with his drawers around his ankles. They always remembered when he came back to town and sat at a front table in a new red dress, with a new hairstyle, with all their scars and defects powdered into invisibility by an emergent confidence and the promise of a night with Moses. He has safe houses from here to Galveston maintained by ugly but worthy women no other man wants. They are good cooks, excellent cooks all of them, and sometimes when he recollects his time with them
it is the food he remembers first. Maybe he does it for the food after all. For pig’s feet like jelly.

This night Moses decides to change his repertoire. He’s in Chicago for a week and he feels full of luck. There are so many beautiful women in the crowd tonight he thinks maybe he can do what he wants. Not play it safe. In the front row a young lady in a blue dress with a collar of white lace fans herself and he can see sweat slide out of the depression in her neck. He’ll lick it dry he thinks, and can’t help grinning and gloating over that future taste. She’s smiling too, back up at him, no man at her table, she’s stepping out tonight with two sweet and wonderfully plump friends. All of them in a big bed together. What their asses will feel like with his guitar hands squeezing them. Knead them like dough. His eyes ramble on as he takes notes: Oh, that woman in the red dress leaning on the bar, the way her leg’s cricked up on the rail, he can see the slope of her calf. It’s a small sexy lump, obscured now by a patron dragging himself up for a drink, but it vibrates in his head and trembles with naughty notes. He’ll talk to her, the ugly woman will have to fend for herself tonight. He’s on the South Side of Chicago and he has one or two songs he’s written that describe the devilment he’ll get into tonight.

Calf or no calf it doesn’t work out that way. He finishes his set, shakes a few hands and struts over to the bar to talk to the woman with the miraculous calf (such a tiny miracle must token other miracles hidden from view by the homemade dress, surely) but before he can get to her the white man intercepts him. Mr. Moses, he says, wiping his eyeglasses with a handkerchief and squinting, that was a powerful set. I wonder if I could talk to you for a minute about a business proposal. Moses, winded from his songs and his mind on his own business proposals thinks, I don’t need any Bibles. He asks, can it wait? and the man says he’s a scout for American Music and he’d like to make a recording of Moses’s songs.

Down the bar within arm’s reach and yet so far down the bar the woman in the red dress laughs and takes the arm of a sharp-faced man in a crisp pinstripe suit. He smiles back at her out of his blue-black face and notices Moses’s stare, and the itinerant bluesman knows he’s not getting any closer to that calf, in his dreams maybe but certainty not tonight. The white man now presses the handkerchief to his brow. It’s hot in here but not that hot, Moses thinks, this guy’s sweating like he’s in the jungle. Ha Ha. At least he’s not a detective about that other matter. My name is Andrew Goodman, he says, giving Moses his card. Have you ever been recorded before? Moses says no, even though Spier down in Jackson approached him on a street corner a year
earlier (a dead afternoon, none of those country Negroes parting with coin for this songman, nuh-uh) with the same proposition. H. C. Spier, the guy that put Tommy Johnson and Ishmon Bracey on Columbia, and who he’s heard just paid Charlie Patton fifty dollars a side. Spier sat him down, gave him some rye and recorded four demo songs. Moses never heard back from him, the songs didn’t make it with the Columbia boys apparently so Moses says, no, never been recorded before. No use letting the guy know his business. He says he’ll come tomorrow to the guy’s shop and he forgets about it for a few hours.

Good old Rudy comes up and thanks Moses for coming, they clasp shared nights and time together with their hands, which leads to one drink and then a couple of drinks and a poker game in Rudy’s back office. His woman thoughts for the night stepped on by the Chicago boy in the pinstripe suit, Moses finds gambling presents itself naturally as pastime for this night. Not that Rudy would let him beg off. He knows he can win back some if not all of Moses’s pay. The other players joke, but not much: regulars in Rudy’s game, they keep their eyes on the cards. Moses helps himself to rye whiskey and one of the guys asks, that’s how you get your voice like that, huh? That and canned heat and antiseptic when he can’t get his hands on anything else. Rudy wins back his money from the talent for the night. The cards are marked. Moses looks up at the stained ceiling; he hadn’t noticed when the noise downstairs stopped. They play poker above an empty saloon. Come four in the morning Rudy’s won half the next night’s pay as well.

As Moses gets up to leave, he asks Rudy is that white guy on the level. Rudy says he’s here whenever there’s a blues act booked. Rudy buys his records at the man’s store over on Forty-third. He’s all right, Rudy says, a little quiet.

When he wakes, sun through slats striping his body, he doesn’t know where he is. There’s nobody next to him and he can see that the room is so small that he must be alone. Unless she’s hiding under the bed. Spending his first night in Chicago by himself. He remembers losing his pay in a poker game and waking up the crotchety old hotel manager at dawn. Did he hit the man or just yell to get him to open the door (his keys glinting on the bureau where he left them before departing for his gig). There’s his guitar along the wall, tilting and sure. He didn’t lose that. He never loses that. It’s like a curse. He drops his feet to the floor and looks at his hideous toes. Does he have anything, even a drop? There’s a brown bottle from two towns ago in his scarred suitcase. It calms him down.

He’s a mug. He has no money. But he feels better now and maybe he’ll see that record man. Fifty dollars a side sounds more real after Rudy’s okay of the man, after a night losing money in Rudy’s back room. Nothing but a train stub in his pocket. He thinks back to how he never heard back from Spier; the lost opportunity made him feel like he does when he’s playing music on a corner and just watching everybody walk on by, no one stops to put a dime in his guitar case. Like he’s not even there. Cracker had a face like a handful of gravel. When he hears about Ish and Skip James selling records and people say, Moses, why don’t you have one of those, he says, shit those crackers know better than to mess with a nigger like me. Tough, like he doesn’t care. At a house party or a dance in a Delta mud town some fool with ashy elbows will ask him to play something he heard on somebody’s record. You don’t do someone else’s stuff. Steal it, yeah, but you don’t just do it like that because some burrheaded fool asks you to. Those guys have got something and it ain’t nothing Moses ain’t got. Sometimes. On a good night. With a good audience, fine women up front to look at and he hasn’t been drinking too much. Spier didn’t call him back so forget about him. Let’s see what this Goodman has to say.

Goodman’s Records is the store on the corner, and its windows are so clean compared to the rest of the establishments down the row that it seems to prop up the whole block, like a piece of wood steadying a wobbly chair. Moses burps, feels a finger of bile in his throat. He looks down at the black handle of the guitar case cut across his palm like a blood brother slash. Time to meet the man, he says and pushes in the door, waking bells.

He figures a lot of these people are in from the country, come into town on a Saturday afternoon to pick up what they need to make the neighbors jealous. Yards of fine new cloth, new pots like what they see only in the Sears catalog and maybe a new Bible. Dust in their cuffs and untamed hems, boots for the fields. No place to buy race records where they live, Goodman’s is a telegraph wire to the rest of the Negro world. He’s a smart little white boy: set up shop on the South Side where other white people are too scared to give the folks what they need. Where there’s a clientele and a need. He sees four listening booths along the right wall and a skinny boy disappears into one, clutching some nasty tune under his arms. Generally he’ll stay out of record stores; the names of his fellow songsmiths up there on the wall, or angled up in crates like a plot of wind-fret weeds, depress him. He sees the names of men he has played with, traded tunes with, shared women with. They have been recorded. A young woman, her face hidden by the drooping flaps of her
hat, snatches a James record out of a bin; he recognizes the label: Paramount. Paramount and Decca and Lonely Moon. Lemon Jefferson has been dead for years but they don’t want the public to know. They put out the backlog of recordings one after another so people will think he’s still alive. He reads,
Paramount Records are recorded by the latest electrical process. Great volume, amazing clear tone. Always the best music—-first on Paramount!
There’s a little pip of a boy at the register but Moses doesn’t see Goodman. Sweat pouring out of him. He tightens the fat knot of his tie and sees the instruments at the back of the store. Violins and banjos on little hooks on the wall like family pictures, sheet music in rows, folk ditties and Scott Joplin. He sees the guitars. Brand-new Stellas and Nationals for nine dollars and ninety-five cents. Rues his scratched-up old Stella that’s almost as scratched up as him, and works the best as it can, like him. Have you seen the new Tri-Cone Nationals? Goodman asks, coming out of the back room. He nods up to something beautiful that Moses doesn’t see; Moses sees a hundred-and-twenty-five-dollar price tag and strings popped on his old Stella. I’m glad you came down, Moses, Goodman says. The man nods to the stringy boy at the register and sends a stare that orders, don’t let these people put anything in their coats.

Upstairs at Goodman’s boxes and boxes of records are stacked to the ceiling and hide dusty windows. The air doesn’t move up there. Walking up the steps makes him a little dizzy and red snakes writhe popping on his eyeballs. You can take that stool, Goodman says. Moses falls into the stool like a diver. I got the idea when I started doing vanity records for my customers, the white man says. For five dollars I put their songs down for them. “Happy Birthday, Annie,” whatever they want. Then a man came in from American looking for some race records and we started talking. He was supposed to be in charge of the company’s race music label and didn’t know a thing about who’s out there. Hadn’t heard of anybody.

How much do I get for this?

I can offer you forty dollars a side.

I’ve heard people get sixty, seventy dollars a side for work like this.

Who’s paying sixty?

That’s what I heard.

Look, I don’t even know if American is going to go for your stuff. Do you know how much they have to sell just to break even? Five hundred. I don’t even know if what we get is going to be usable.

Do you have something to get me started?

What do you mean?

A little something.

Ah. That’s right. Goodman considers how much whiskey to put in the tin cup, then pours a taste more in. Seems he was prepared, Moses thinks. He knows how to treat talent. Goodman opens an icebox in the back of the room and pulls out a platter of beeswax an inch thick. He says, The heat can ruin it so I have to keep the masters in there.

I’ve heard about that. (Seen it before.)

From that mike, your music will go from the microphone and through to the amplifying stylus and that will cut it into the wax. It’s pretty straightforward.