Song of Susannah (47 page)

Ka might have put that downtown bus where it was when Mia’s cab pulled up, or it might only have been coincidence. Certainly it’s the sort of question that provokes argument from the humblest street-preacher (can you give me hallelujah) all the way up to the mightiest of theological philosophers (can you give me a Socratic amen). Some might consider it almost frivolous; the mighty issues that loom their shadows behind the question, however, are anything but.

One downtown bus, half empty.

But if it hadn’t been there on the corner of Lex and Sixty-first, Mia likely would never have noticed the man playing the guitar. And, had she not stopped to listen to the man playing the guitar, who knows how much of what followed might have been different?

“Awwww,
man
, wouldja looka-
dat!
” the cab driver exclaimed, and lifted his hand to his windshield in an
exasperated gesture. A bus was parked on the corner of Lexington and Sixty-first, its diesel engine rumbling and its taillights flashing what Mia took to be some kind of distress code. The bus driver was standing by one of the rear wheels, looking at the dark cloud of diesel smoke pouring from the bus’s rear vent.

“Lady,” said the cab driver, “you mind getting off on the corner of Sixtieth? Tha’be all right?”

Is it?
Mia asked.
What should I say?

Sure
, Susannah replied absently.
Sixtieth’s fine.

Mia’s question had called her back from her version of the Dogan, where she’d been trying to get in touch with Eddie. She’d had no luck doing that, and was appalled at the state of the place. The cracks in the floor now ran deep, and one of the ceiling panels had crashed down, bringing the fluorescent lights and several long snarls of electrical cable with it. Some of the instrument panels had gone dark. Others were seeping tendrils of smoke. The needle on the
S
USANNAH
-M
IO
dial was all the way over into the red. Below her feet, the floor was vibrating and the machinery was screaming. And saying that none of this was real, it was all only a visualization technique, kind of missed the whole point, didn’t it? She’d shut down a very powerful process, and her body was paying a price. The Voice of the Dogan had warned her that what she was doing was dangerous; that it wasn’t (in the words of a TV ad) nice to fool Mother Nature. Susannah had no idea which of her glands and organs were taking the biggest beating, but she knew that they
were
hers. Not Mia’s. It was time to call a halt to this madness before everything went sky-high.

First, though, she’d tried to get in touch with Eddie, yelling his name repeatedly into the mike with
NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS
stamped on it. Nothing. Yelling Roland’s name also brought no result. If they were dead, she would have known it. She was sure of that. But not to be able to get in touch with them at
all
. . . what did that mean?

It mean you once mo’ been fucked mos’ righteous, honeychile
, Detta told her, and cackled.
This what you get fo’ messin wit’ honkies.

I can get out here?
Mia was asking, shy as a girl arriving at her first dance.
Really?

Susannah would have slapped her own brow, had she had one. God, when it was about anything but her baby, the bitch was so goddam
timid!

Yes, go ahead. It’s only a single block, and on the avenues, the blocks are short.

The driver . . . how much should I give the driver?

Give him a ten and let him keep the change. Here, hold it out for me
—

Susannah sensed Mia’s reluctance and reacted with weary anger. This was not entirely without amusement.

Listen to me, sweetheart, I wash my hands of you. Okay? Give him any fucking bill you want.

No, no, it’s all right.
Humble now. Frightened.
I trust you, Susannah.
And she held up the remaining bills from Mats, fanned out in front of her eyes like a hand of cards.

Susannah almost refused, but what was the point? She
came forward
, took control of the brown hands holding the money, selected a ten,
and gave it to the driver. “Keep the change,” she said.

“Thanks, lady!”

Susannah opened the curbside door. A robot voice began to speak when she did, startling her—startling both of them. It was someone named Whoopi Goldberg, reminding her to take her bags. For Susannah-Mia, the question of her gunna was moot. There was only one piece of baggage which concerned them now, and of this Mia would soon be delivered.

She heard guitar music. At the same time she felt her control over the hand stuffing money back into her pocket and the leg swinging out of the cab begin to ebb. Mia, taking over again now that Susannah had solved another of her little New York dilemmas. Susannah began to struggle against this usurpation

(my
body, goddammit
, mine,
at least from the waist up, and that includes the head and the brain inside it!
)

and then quit. What was the use? Mia was stronger. Susannah had no idea why that should be, but she knew that it was.

A kind of queer
Bushido
fatalism had come over Susannah Dean by this point. It was the sort of calmness that cloaks the drivers of cars skidding helplessly toward bridge overpasses, the pilots of planes that heel over into their final dives, their engines dead . . . and gunslingers driven to their final cave or draw. Later she might fight, if fighting seemed either worthwhile or honorable. She would fight to save herself or the baby, but not Mia—this was her decision. Mia had forfeited any chance of
rescue she might once have deserved, in Susannah’s eyes.

For now there was nothing to do, except maybe to turn the
LABOR FORCE
dial back to 10. She thought she would be allowed that much control.

Before that, though . . . the music. The guitar. It was a song she knew, and knew well. She had sung a version of it to the
folken
the night of their arrival in Calla Bryn Sturgis.

After all she had been through since meeting Roland, hearing “Man of Constant Sorrow” on this New York streetcorner did not strike her as coincidental in the least. And it was a wonderful song, wasn’t it? Perhaps the vertex of all the folk songs she had so loved as a younger woman, the ones that had seduced her, step by step, into activism and had led her finally to Oxford, Mississippi. Those days were gone—she felt ever so much older than she had then—but this song’s sad simplicity still appealed to her. The Dixie Pig was less than a block from here. Once Mia had transported them through its doors, Susannah would be in the Land of the Crimson King. She had no doubts or illusions about that. She did not expect to return from there, did not expect to see either her friends or her beloved again, and had an idea she might have to die with Mia’s cheated howls for company . . . but none of that had to interfere with her enjoyment of this song now. Was it her death-song? If so, fine.

Susannah, daughter of Dan, reckoned there could have been far worse.

The busker had set up shop in front of a café called Blackstrap Molasses. His guitar case was open in front of him, its purple velvet interior (exactly the same shade as the rug in sai King’s Bridgton bedroom, can you say amen) scattered with change and bills, just so any unusually innocent passersby would know the right thing to do. He was sitting on a sturdy wooden cube which looked exactly like the one upon which the Rev. Harrigan stood to preach.

There were signs that he was almost through for the night. He had put on his jacket, which bore a New York Yankees patch on the sleeve, and a hat with
JOHN LENNON LIVES
printed above the bill. There had apparently been a sign in front of him but now it was back in his instrument case, words-side down. Not that Mia would have known what was writ upon it in any case, not she.

He looked at her, smiled, and quit his fingerpicking. She raised one of the remaining bills and said, “I’ll give you this if you’ll play that song again. All of it, this time.”

The young man looked about twenty, and while there was nothing very handsome about him, with his pale, spotty complexion, the gold ring in one of his nostrils, and the cigarette jutting from the corner of his mouth, he had an engaging air. His eyes widened as he realized whose face was on the bit of currency she was holding. “Lady, for fifty bucks I’d play every Ralph Stanley song I know . . . and I know quite a few of em.”

“Just this one will do us fine,” Mia said, and
tossed the bill. It fluttered into the busker’s guitar case. He watched its prankish descent with disbelief. “Hurry,” Mia said. Susannah was quiet, but Mia sensed her listening. “My time is short. Play.”

And so the guitar-player sitting on the box in front of the café began to play a song Susannah had first heard in The Hungry i, a song she had herself sung at God only knew how many hootenannies, a song she’d once sung behind a motel in Oxford, Mississippi. The night before they had all been thrown in jail, that had been. By then those three young voter-registration boys had been missing almost a month, gone into the black Mississippi earth somewhere in the general vicinity of Philadelphia (they were eventually found in the town of Longdale, can you give me hallelujah, can you please say amen). That fabled White Sledgehammer had begun once more to swing in the redneck toolies, but they had sung anyway. Odetta Holmes—Det, they called her in those days—had begun this particular song and then the rest of them joined in, the boys singing
man
and the girls singing
maid.
Now, rapt within the Dogan which had become her gulag, Susannah listened as this young man, unborn in those terrible old days, sang it again. The cofferdam of her memory broke wide open and it was Mia, unprepared for the violence of these recollections, who was lifted upon the wave.

In the Land of Memory, the time is always
Now.

In the Kingdom of Ago, the clocks tick . . . but their hands never move.

There is an Unfound Door

(O lost)

and memory is the key which opens it.

Their names are Cheney, Goodman, Schwerner; these are those who fall beneath the swing of the White Sledgehammer on the 19th of June, 1964.

O Discordia!

They’re staying at a place called the Blue Moon Motor Hotel, on the Negro side of Oxford, Mississippi. The Blue Moon is owned by Lester Bambry, whose brother John is pastor of the First Afro-American Methodist Church of Oxford, can you give me hallelujah, can you say amen.

It is July 19th of 1964, a month to the day after the disappearance of Cheney, Goodman, and Schwerner. Three days after they disappeared somewhere around Philadelphia there was a meeting at John Bambry’s church and the local Negro activists told the three dozen or so remaining white northerners that in light of what was now happening, they were of course free to go home. And some of them
have
gone home, praise God, but Odetta Holmes and eighteen others stay. Yes. They stay at the Blue Moon Motor Hotel. And sometimes at night they go out back, and Delbert Anderson brings his guitar and they sing.

“I Shall Be Released,” they sing and

“John Henry,” they sing, gonna whop the steel on down (great Gawd, say Gawd-bomb), and they sing

“Blowin in the Wind” and they sing

“Hesitation Blues” by the Rev. Gary Davis, all of them laughing at the amiably risqué verses: a dollar is a dollar and a dime is a dime I got a houseful of chillun ain’t none of em mine, and they sing

“I Ain’t Marchin Anymore” and they sing

in the Land of Memory and the Kingdom of Ago they sing

in the blood-heat of their youth, in the strength of their bodies, in the confidence of their minds they sing

to deny Discordia

to deny the can toi

in affirmation of Gan the Maker, Gan the Evil-taker

they don’t know these names

they know all these names

the heart sings what it must sing

the blood knows what the blood knows

on the Path of the Beam our hearts know all the secrets

and they sing

sing

Odetta begins and Delbert Anderson plays; she sings

“I am a maid of constant sorrow . . . I’ve seen trouble all my days . . . I bid farewell . . . to old Ken-tucky . . .”

So Mia was ushered through the Unfound Door and into the Land of Memory, transported to the weedy yard behind Lester Bambry’s Blue Moon Motor Hotel, and so she heard—

(hears)

Mia hears the woman who will become Susannah as she sings her song. She hears the others join in, one by one, until they are all singing together in a choir, and overhead is the Mississippi moon, raining its radiance down on their faces—some black, some white—and upon the cold steel rails of the tracks which run behind the hotel, tracks which run south from here, which run out to Longdale, the town where on August 5th of 1964 the badly decomposed bodies of their amigos will be found—James Cheney, twenty-one; Andrew Goodman, twenty-one; Michael Schwerner, twenty-four; O Discordia! And to you who favor darkness, give you joy of the red Eye that shines there.

She hears them sing.

All thro’ this Earth I’m bound to ramble . . . Thro’ storm and wind, thro’ sleet and rain . . . I’m bound to ride that Northern railroad . . .

Nothing opens the eye of memory like a song, and it is Odetta’s memories that lift Mia and carry her as they sing together, Det and her ka-mates under the silvery moon. Mia sees them walking hence from here with their arms linked, singing