nudged Will quizzically but he refused to look at me. The volume swelled as those around me joined the singing. Will stood stock-still as the congregation bobbed and swayed around him.
When we were driving home I asked him what was the point of attending that kind of church if you were just going to stand there like a pillar of salt. When he didn’t answer I said, “Was this about the girl? Is that why we went?”
“I think she’s got a future as a singer,” Will finally said.
“Have you been talking to her?”
“Colored folks, when they say, ‘You been talking to her?’—they mean, ‘Have you been fucking her?’ They say, ‘I ain’t been talking to her. No way.’ ”
I wasn’t going to let him dodge my question with this nugget of anthropology, but then I saw his expression. I saw, to my amazement, that he was in love. Far from enraptured, though, he looked ill, like a man who has just been given the opportunity to confess to a terrible crime.
That afternoon and evening we drove up and down Route 1, along the river, “looking for music,” as Will put it. Will would turn off the main road and cruise slowly down the side streets, stopping whenever he saw a cluster of lounging black men. Then, after chatting about the weather and the crops, he would ask whether they knew any musicians. Climbing back in the car, where I was happy to sit reading, he’d scribble in a spiral notebook. Finally at one little town we stopped in front of a boarded-up storefront from which we could hear the muffled wail of the blues, PLAYBOY LOUNGE was painted in crude letters over the door.As we watched, a man staggered out of the place, blinking in the low sunlight, and fumbled with a pack of cigarettes.
“You coming,” Will asked.
“Someone has to notify your next of kin.” I’d had my fill of juke joints for the moment.
I locked the doors behind him and tried to concentrate on my French, but I kept wondering what I would do if Will didn’t come out. Actually, at that time—’66—Will was fairly safe, beneficiary of a feudal system which was, despite recent challenges, still in place. After nearly an hour, he emerged in a state of high excitement, having learned that one of his blues heroes was living nearby. “He was recorded by Alan Lomax back in the forties,” he explained. “Everybody just figured he was dead.”
As the evening drew on we drove out into the middle of a cotton field, stopping in front of a tiny unpainted shack on cinder blocks. A wizened old black woman in a dirty pink dress answered the door. Between her accent and her thorough lack of teeth I couldn’t make out a word she said, but I gathered from Will’s responses that she didn’t know where her husband was.
“Damn,” he said. “Says he’s on a drunk and she hasn’t seen him in three days. I can’t believe he’s been living not ten miles from Bear Track all these years.” Will’s eyes glittered with a sense of quest, like a collector in pursuit of a rare piece of porcelain. He proposed that we conduct a town-to-town, juke-to-juke search for the missing singer, but I persuaded him to drop me off at Bear Track first. As the sun disappeared over the levee, Will dropped me at the house and set off into the cool Mississippi night.
VII
T he firm is in a quiet uproar. This morning’s tabloids are shrill with lurid details of Felson’s murder. The motel where his body was found murdered was a notorious haunt of homosexual prostitutes, and Felson was apparently a regular patron. A variety of gay pornography and sexual paraphernalia had been discovered in the room, which explained several of the questions the detectives lobbed at me when they came to my office. A few hours after they left, I was brooding about the whole sorry business when I remembered something I could have told them. One morning—it must have been six or seven years ago—I rode up in the elevator with Felson and noticed that he had a black eye. And then, a few
When we were driving home I asked him what was the point of attending that kind of church if you were just going to stand there like a pillar of salt. When he didn’t answer I said, “Was this about the girl? Is that why we went?”
“I think she’s got a future as a singer,” Will finally said.
“Have you been talking to her?”
“Colored folks, when they say, ‘You been talking to her?’—they mean, ‘Have you been fucking her?’ They say, ‘I ain’t been talking to her. No way.’ ”
I wasn’t going to let him dodge my question with this nugget of anthropology, but then I saw his expression. I saw, to my amazement, that he was in love. Far from enraptured, though, he looked ill, like a man who has just been given the opportunity to confess to a terrible crime.
That afternoon and evening we drove up and down Route 1, along the river, “looking for music,” as Will put it. Will would turn off the main road and cruise slowly down the side streets, stopping whenever he saw a cluster of lounging black men. Then, after chatting about the weather and the crops, he would ask whether they knew any musicians. Climbing back in the car, where I was happy to sit reading, he’d scribble in a spiral notebook. Finally at one little town we stopped in front of a boarded-up storefront from which we could hear the muffled wail of the blues, PLAYBOY LOUNGE was painted in crude letters over the door.As we watched, a man staggered out of the place, blinking in the low sunlight, and fumbled with a pack of cigarettes.
“You coming,” Will asked.
“Someone has to notify your next of kin.” I’d had my fill of juke joints for the moment.
I locked the doors behind him and tried to concentrate on my French, but I kept wondering what I would do if Will didn’t come out. Actually, at that time—’66—Will was fairly safe, beneficiary of a feudal system which was, despite recent challenges, still in place. After nearly an hour, he emerged in a state of high excitement, having learned that one of his blues heroes was living nearby. “He was recorded by Alan Lomax back in the forties,” he explained. “Everybody just figured he was dead.”
As the evening drew on we drove out into the middle of a cotton field, stopping in front of a tiny unpainted shack on cinder blocks. A wizened old black woman in a dirty pink dress answered the door. Between her accent and her thorough lack of teeth I couldn’t make out a word she said, but I gathered from Will’s responses that she didn’t know where her husband was.
“Damn,” he said. “Says he’s on a drunk and she hasn’t seen him in three days. I can’t believe he’s been living not ten miles from Bear Track all these years.” Will’s eyes glittered with a sense of quest, like a collector in pursuit of a rare piece of porcelain. He proposed that we conduct a town-to-town, juke-to-juke search for the missing singer, but I persuaded him to drop me off at Bear Track first. As the sun disappeared over the levee, Will dropped me at the house and set off into the cool Mississippi night.
VII
T he firm is in a quiet uproar. This morning’s tabloids are shrill with lurid details of Felson’s murder. The motel where his body was found murdered was a notorious haunt of homosexual prostitutes, and Felson was apparently a regular patron. A variety of gay pornography and sexual paraphernalia had been discovered in the room, which explained several of the questions the detectives lobbed at me when they came to my office. A few hours after they left, I was brooding about the whole sorry business when I remembered something I could have told them. One morning—it must have been six or seven years ago—I rode up in the elevator with Felson and noticed that he had a black eye. And then, a few
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