NINE
A report prevailed in town yesterday, that a part of the town of Natchez had been sunk by an Earthquake, and that four thousand persons perished. — We trust that this report will prove to be unfounded; but if such a deplorable circumstance has taken place, it could not have been on the morning of the 16th December, as a letter dated on that date at Natchez, and published some time since at the city of Washington, says “A considerable shock of an Earthquake was felt here last night,” without adding anything further...
Charleston, Jan. 24, 1812
They were late in getting started because Viondi needed to pick up something to deliver to one of his relatives in Mississippi. What the object turned out to be was a large silver samovar, over two feet tall, tossed casually in a cardboard box in Viondi’s trunk, next to another cardboard box that held Viondi’s clothes and toilet articles. Nick put his soft-sided suitcase and his satchel in the trunk next to the boxes.
“A samovar?” Nick said. “What’s your family doing with a samovar?”
“Is that what it’s called?” Viondi shrugged. “No idea how we got it, brother. You can ask Aunt Loretta when you meet her. We use it to make tea and shit.”
“And what happened to your suitcase? Why’s your stuff in a box?”
“I loaned my suitcase to Dion.” Dion was one of Viondi’s sons. “But he was living with his girlfriend, and when she moved out, she packed her stuff into the suitcase and never gave it back. And she and Dion don’t talk to each other no more, so odds are I won’t ever see my suitcase again.”
Nick looked at Viondi. “It’s a complicated family you’ve got, Viondi.”
Viondi grinned at him through his bushy beard. “All families are complicated.”
He slammed the trunk with his big hands, mashing the cardboard box of clothes. “You want to drive?”
Nick shrugged. “Might as well.”
“She won’t bother.” The loud voice of a well-dressed white businessman cut across from the sidewalk, talking to another businessman. “The nigger who’s right? No way.”
Nick hunched for a moment, anger kindling in his soul at the slur that just flew in from nowhere, and then he realized that what the man had actually said was, “She won’t bother to figure who’s right.” And he tried to relax, but the carefree moment was gone.
He looked at Viondi, and could tell from his expression that he had processed the random words the same way Nick had, and had then made the same correction.
Shit, Nick thought. You were always ready for it. Always braced for bigotry until sometimes you heard it where it didn’t exist. No wonder so many black people die of hypertension.
“Give me the keys,” Nick said.
The keys to the Buick spun glittering through the air. Nick caught them on his palm, opened the door, slid into the leather seat.
The car still smelled new.
Viondi jumped into the shotgun seat and picked up a satchel of tapes. “What you want to listen to?”
Nick narrowed his eyes as he gazed over the wheel at the busy street in front of him. “The blues,” he said.
Viondi looked at him. “You got some more bad news?” he asked.
“Heard from Lockheed on Friday,” he said. “I didn’t get the job.”
“Sorry, man. That’s bad.”
Nick started the car.
“You got any more places to apply?”
Nick shook his head. “Not for the kind of work that I do.”
“There’s all sorts of engineers, though, right? I mean, you can get a job in another field?”
“Yeah. Maybe. But I’m about fifteen years out of date for anything but what I’ve been doing.”
Viondi thought for a moment. “You get back from seeing your girl,” he said, “we’ll talk. I’ll get you some work.”
“I don’t know anything about plumbing.”
Viondi’s laugh boomed out in the car. “Nick, you an engineer! You don’t think you can learn plumbing? Only two things you got to know about plumbing. The first is that shit runs downhill, and the second is that payday’s on Friday.”
A reluctant laugh rolled up out of Nick. “Yeah, okay,” he said.
“A man sends his daughter to France, that man needs a job.”
Nick sighed. “I know,” he said.
“Professor Longhair’s what you need,” Viondi said. He slotted in a tape. “Let’s hear a little of that N’Yawlins music, get that Louisiana sound in your soul.”
So they listened to Professor Longhair on their way out of St. Louis, and as they headed south on I-55 they followed it with Little Charlie and the Nightcats, Koko Taylor, and Big Twist and the Mellow Fellows. They avoided the Swampeast by crossing into Illinois at Cape Girardeau, the silver bridge vaulting them over a brown, swollen Mississippi that was packed high between the levees and walls. Even from high above, on the bridge, the slick, glittering river looked fast, deep, and dangerous.
The old town of Cairo was decaying gently behind its tall concrete river walls. Viondi took over the driving because he wanted to stop at a barbecue place he remembered, and he drove around the shabby downtown area for twenty minutes, but the restaurant had closed or he couldn’t find it, so they got some burgers and crossed the Ohio into Kentucky. They followed Highway 51 through Fulton into Tennessee, and then south through Dyersburg and Covington. And as they approached the homeland of the blues, Viondi’s music drifted back in time, a connection to the heat and toil and sadness of the Delta, all the horrible old history, shackles and cotton fields, mob violence and the lash. Lonnie Johnson. Son Seals. Victoria Spivey. Robert Johnson.
“My granddad came north up this road,” Viondi said. “Highway 61 out of the Mississippi Delta to Memphis, then 51 north on his way to Chicago.”
“That’s the way a lot of people went,” Nick said. “My mother’s people came north that way.”
“North to the Promised Land. Get away from the Bilbos and the coneheads. And what they got was South Chicago.” Viondi shook his head. “I remember driving down with my family during the summers to see all the relatives we left behind. All the old folks, still in Friars Point. The backseat all packed with kids and packages and the smell of food.”
They carried their food, Nick knew, because black people could never be sure if restaurants would serve them. And even after segregation ended, the habit of carrying food along continued.
Nick’s stomach rumbled. He found himself wishing there was a full hamper on the backseat.
“You still got people there?” Nick asked.
“A few. All working for Catfish Pride.”
“And one of them owns a samovar.”
“Aunt Loretta isn’t a relative, she’s a used-to-be in-law. She’s kin to Darrell’s momma.” Viondi smiled. “She’ll put us up tonight. You’ll see.” He lifted his sunglasses, looked at Nick out of the corner of one eye. “You getting hungry?”
“Yeah. That burger didn’t last. Maybe we can get something in Memphis.”
“I know a place that’s closer.”
Nick sighed. “Sure we can find it?”
Viondi dropped his sunglasses back on his nose and laughed. “Let’s check it out. You don’t want to eat now, we’ll get some takeout.”
The restaurant was open, an old ramshackle seafood place that loomed above the Hatchie north of Garland, gray weathered clapboards and mossy shakes on the roof. Nick and Viondi ate fish, cole slaw, greens, a bottle of Bud apiece, then stepped out onto the dense heat of the late afternoon and looked down at the thick, slow river, swollen by the backwash of the Mississippi. Nick felt an unaccustomed contentment easing his strung-wire muscles, and he touched the little box in his shirt pocket, the diamond necklace he had bought for Arlette.
Tomorrow he’d give it to her. He imagined her eyes shining.
Tomorrow.