WE WERE IN MISSISSIPPI, driving through rolling hills, then out across the great flat bottomlands of the Delta. Long straight roads, our old Ford ghosted by the dust. High cotton. Fields bounded by stands of hickory and pine. There were signs, Chester said. You could tell the houses where there were records to be found. Lace curtains, flowers on the porch, old jugs or oil cans on poles as nest boxes for the martins. Any sign of old ways or old people. What you wanted was a place where the same family had lived for years.
Driving down long roads. Long dry roads. Instead of goading me to make time, Chester began to consult his maps more frequently, directing me along zigzag routes to small towns, where we’d pass by neighborhoods of neat clapboard houses into zones of tin roofs and patched walls and decay, always some line to cross to get there, a highway or railroad track. Chester, knocking on doors, asking his monomaniacal question. Got any records? Under your porch, maybe? Pay a dime a piece.
—I don’t know Rev’nd. Could have.
If there was digging, or lifting, that was my job. Worming under foundations. Dragging trunks and crates out of sheds and barns, while Chester made conversation. He would adopt a bantering manner, laughing loudly, slapping his non-Bible hand against his chest in counterfeit glee. It went over less well than he thought. Those old pickers and sharecroppers had seen carpetbaggers in their time. I watched faces close down as they tried to work out his angle. They could sense something straining, something violent kept on a tight leash.
There was something secondhand about the way Chester treated those people, as if he’d learned it from a manual. He had no real warmth. But because he was determined, we found records. We grubbed them up out of the dirt.
We found Columbia 14299, Barbecue Bob “Motherless Chile Blues” / “Thinkin’ Funny Blues” and Victor 21076 Luke Jordan “Church Bell Blues” / “Cocaine Blues.” We found Brunswick 7125 Robert Wilkins “That’s No Way to Get Along” / “Alabama Blues” and Brunswick 7166 Joe Calicott “Fare Thee Well Blues” / “Traveling Mama Blues.” We had two Pattons, a worn copy of Paramount 12909 “High Water Everywhere Part 1” / “High Water Everywhere Part 2” and a clean Vocalion 02680, “High Sheriff Blues” / “Stone Pony Blues.” We had a dozen good commercial female vocals, mostly Ma Rainey and Ida Cox, as well as a number of country records, which was a surprise to me, as I’d thought black people had no interest in the Carter Family or Jimmie Rodgers. Chester was oddly excited by Okeh 8960, The Memphis Jug Band “Memphis Shakedown” / “Mary Anna Cut Off,” which he declared he had been hunting for ten years.
We would get to the end of our day, coated in sweat and road dust, and eat at the counter of whatever diner was nearest our motel, spooning up mashed potato and guzzling sweet iced tea. Then Chester would take one of his bathroom breaks. On the road, he never fixed up in front of me. He was, I think, very worried about the police. A child could have seen how we stood out, him in his preacher’s black suit, me in the patterned shirt and cutoffs that made me look like what I was, a semi-beatnik northern kid. In white neighborhoods, people stared at us, even more than in black ones. Sometimes the attention was kindly. Sometimes not.
—Where you from, son?
There was a local way of repeating “New York.” A special curl of the lip.
When he was floating on his cloud, Chester would lie on whatever motel room bed under whatever picture—Jesus, a waterfall, dogs playing poker—and ramble on about wanting to “suck up every damn record” in some place, the place we were in, a place up the road, a place we’d been or were planning to go. He wanted to leave nothing for the next man. That was his oft-repeated vow. It got old quickly. I would drift off into my own fantasies. Barefoot girls in cotton dresses. Skinny dipping. Sometimes he would touch on other topics, talking about records he had, records he wanted, records he thought ought to be smashed to pieces “to do the world a favor.”
—Actually since you ask there are several lady collectors. I have corresponded with a Mrs. Levison in San Francisco. A Mrs. Audrey Levison. She has an interest in polkas. Also Yiddish folk tunes.
Eventually one of us would turn to the portable record player and play one of our discoveries. Voices, rising up out of the hiss.
They accuse me of forgery: can’t even sign my name
They accuse me of forgery: can’t even sign my name
Accuse me of murder, I never know the man
THIS IS HOW WE CROSS THE LINE. Farms set back from the road. Flat open country, flatter sky. Signs saying No stopping for next 5 miles and Do not pick up hitchhikers, then a prison, high blocks visible beyond a parking lot. I turn my head to read a billboard.
Walxr: Correctional solutions for a multipolar world.
The perimeter flies past, mute gray sheds inside the wire. Leonie looks over at me, gauging my reaction. You can’t choose where you’re born, she says, as if she expects me to disagree. You can’t choose your family. When you say someone’s from something, some place or group or category. When you say that, what does it even mean?
She talks about guilt, about how her shrink told her that no one should have to feel guilty all the time.
—My brother feels guilty for being a rich boy. That’s why his heroes are always poor or black. I told him, it’s not like you’re helping anyone by listening to music. No one cares if you like black people.
—He respects the music.
—That doesn’t make them like you any better. It’s theirs. They’d rather you left it to them. Even if you did something, I don’t know, really selfless. Black lives matter or whatever. They still wouldn’t like you.
Then it is night. Leonie navigates the car slowly down a twinkling strip of lights, semis high-beaming us as we dawdle in the slow lane. She passes the usual fast-food restaurants, doubling back after a couple of miles to crawl the other side of the highway. Finally we find a low-roofed bar sitting like an island in a darkened lot, a place with a beer sign in the window and scarred wooden booths that hide the world in a comforting way. We flip over laminated cards and give our order to a weary middle-aged waitress. When the food comes, neither of us are hungry for the baskets heaped with chicken and okra and dessert-sweet slaw.