I had a mouth, they said. No one liked a coon with a mouth. I worked. I rolled. I dumped the earth. And I knew that if one afternoon I fell in the heat, Captain Jack would set to until I died or got up again. Every day that awful morning bell. You wake up and for a moment you forget where you are. Only for a moment. And always the fines for falling behind, talking back. Everything you do they add days or dollars. And you got no dollars so they add days. That’s how they do. That’s how they drive you down.
BECAUSE NO ONE REMEMBERS ME and no one living will ever hear my music, because I am down in the levee where it is cold and dark. How did it take me? What difference does it make? Typhoid. Heat stroke. An accident, my body broken or cut or crushed. Captain Jack, looking down on me, telling me to get back to work. Captain Jack with the whip and the gun.
I’m tired, I say. Me and some of the others. We’re tired. We want to sit down and rest.
—Plenty of rest where I’ll send you.
We are all down on the ground, lying or sitting. Captain Jack waves off the water boy, who is trying to give us a drink, and walks up behind the man next to me and takes out his forty-four. Don’t even hesitate, just blows the side of his head off. It sprays all over me, brains and blood. The world is quiet. My lips move but there is no sound. Just a high whine in my ear. Oh, please don’t do me like you do poor Shine. Don’t do me.
The end is the same, however it comes. They lay me down and cover me in the cold dark earth. Lay me down in the mud with hate in my heart. I ought to have made that session, ought to have walked through the door of the Saint James Hotel. Instead I’m twenty-seven years old and rotting in the levee with hate in my heart. Starless desolation in my heart. I was never paid for the whip and the gun, never paid for the work I done. Hate in my heart that can never die because no one will ever hear my music and no one even remembers my name. But I turn out to be stronger than death. The record I never got to make is out there, at least sometimes, for those that have ears to hear. I put it there. I kept pushing it out. And now I have found a horse to ride. This boy. This weak boy. I have found a way back up into the world.
So I look through his eyes, early one morning, and we wake up on the levee and stare down at a great gray mass of moving water. I am up on the levee, thinks the boy. I am in a bus. I am waiting for a bus, my clothes inexplicably covered in mud. I walk and ride and walk again. In slow stages I make my way back to the city. Far away I can see the sign, the red illuminated sign saying HOTEL. When I get there, I walk up the front steps like Saint James himself. I do not go round to the kitchen entrance. I have a right to be there. I am keeping an important appointment with the gentlemen from the Key & Gate Recording Laboratories. The lobby is bustling. Middle-aged men walk to and fro with conference passes on lanyards. On either side of the entrance doors stand a pair of banners, the vertical kind that come with a lightweight metal stand. The 33rd Annual Congress of the American Federation of Incarceration Service Providers. Girls in conference tee shirts are handing out flyers.
—Just over there is the registration table where you can pick up your packet.
—I have a letter. Mr. Speir sent me.
That hard face getting out of the elevator, its expression set and bland. Cornelius Wallace, as I live and breathe. A circle of men surround him as he walks through the lobby, shaking hands, stopping once to have his picture taken with a man in a police uniform. I call out to him.
—Cornelius? Corny?
He looks in my direction, frowns, then turns away.
—Yeah, that’s right. Pretend you don’t see me. I know you see me. I know you, Corny Wallace. I know you can see me.
People are staring. Men with conference passes on lanyards.
—I know about your family. About how you made your money.