An Excerpt from
Mississippi Blues
by Kathleen Ann Goonan
(Tor, 1997, $25.95)
From Part Three, "Blaze Gets the Blues"
Her room, in the back of the Jook House, was filled with African things. Out the open window I could hear Stewball pounding around the paddock and whinnying like he knew I should be going but I didn't care.
Masks were on the wall of her room, with severe and distant features. A few small statues, I guess you might call them, were arranged on a plain, almost Shaker-like table; they were abstract and beautiful but still I recognized them: a spider, a fox, a rabbit, a turtle. She saw me looking at them and started to talk, her voice low but precise, like she was teaching her class. "Those are African Tricksters. They live to upset anything they possibly can. They like to cause chaos, create a whole new situation that lets in light and life. They are the enemies of the status quo. They seem tiny and powerless, but their power is the power of the mind. They help people survive in hard times by giving them a way to trick those in power without ever revealing themselves." She reached for a grinning wooden monkey which was on her bed table; handed him to me. "Meet Signifyin' Monkey. You can signify without revealing. The blues is all about signifying--and quoting, in a way. Showing; representing. Like all art, it's also about taking time and tearing it up--ragging time--reforming it, repeating it, overlaying it, putting it back together in your own way. Taking from the world and making it new, giving it shape and form. That is what humans do--take raw information, nature, and make something else out of it. It is at the same time their gift and their curse. And the African musical tradition is communal. What the musicians play is constantly modified by what the others play; modified by the dancers. We constantly incorporate the new, make it a part of what we are doing. Every moment is a new community synthesis."
I didn't care about all that, though; not really. "I'd like to be able to play the blues," I said, putting the monkey back on the table, and her eyes became very intense, so deep that I thought they had no bottom but reached back into serious time. She looked skeptical. "I've tried, but it's no good. I feel like . . . I'm only imitating."
"It's only for a few," she said. "You know the story of Robert Johnson, don't you?" she asked.
"No."
"They laughed him off the stage and he went away for a time. When he came back he could play like an angel. Or like the devil. He liked people to believe that he'd met the devil at the crossroads one moonlit night. The devil told him that he'd have to give up his soul, but in return he'd show him how to play the blues."
"Did he agree?" I asked. The Shakers had not talked about the devil too much, and since I knew there was no heaven I wasn't afraid of the devil or hell. They weren't real either.
She laughed quietly. "Well, some people say he got a good start from other musicians, like Son House."
"That's what I need," I said. "Son House, or the devil." Maybe I smiled a little, I don't know, but I was suddenly desperate and she could tell. I needed the blues like I needed food and water, maybe more. To live. To pull together all the parts of myself that were in danger of dissipating forever--my memories, my very sense of self. To make something where there was now nothing; to create myself anew.
She sat at a low table on a cushion and opened a carved box. She took out a small ivory colored vial and shut the box and stood up.
"Take this," she said.
"What will it do?" I asked.
"A musician named John Coltrane believed that the experience of certain organized tones leads to a particular state of mind. Brain scans of musicians show that they use their brains differently than non-musicians. This will . . . remap your mind."
"I don't know," I said, suddenly remembering Verity and the boat and the rafters. The room seemed too small and my throat got dry when I tried to talk. It seemed like my mind had already been remapped, but maybe it had only been un-mapped. Maybe I was just dissolving. I could hear my own heart beating. "It's nan, isn't it?"
"Everything is," she said, her voice going dreamy. "Here. Take it. Take it. Now."
I felt flushed despite the breeze blowing through the room. This was what I'd spent my entire life carefully avoiding. Maybe with good reason. "I've got to go," I said. "I don't have time. I've got to find out about the river and locks and dams. I was supposed to be back hours ago." I was talking fast and stammering and I felt kind of sick.
"So you really don't want to know the blues," she said. She turned away and walked back toward the table, still dreamlike and trancy. You're not the one, her hand said, as it opened the box. You don't deserve the blues, said the stern carved masks. You're white, laughed the tricksters with wicked glee.
I watched her carefully seat the vial into the velvet and her hand poised on the lid of the box.
I thought about how strange everything was now. Shaker Hill was gone, and John had shot me in the chest. Verity and I would never be--whatever I'd thought, lying there in my small white bedroom at Shaker Hill. Whatever I'd thought, we'd never be that. And I was somewhat ruined, imperfect, partially resurrected but undependable and strange even to myself. I did not know what the world held but I knew that when I heard the blues on the radio stone, when I tried in my dull way to play the blues, I felt focussed and as if things were right once again.
I knew then that I would sell my soul to be able to understand the blues. What did it matter? Did I even have a soul with which to barter? If ever I did it was sucked out of me by those sheets. I left it in the Cincinnati train station, in the yard at Shaker Hill, when my Shaker Brother John shot me. He shot it right out of me, and his own too. Verity didn't know what that was like. She never would. Afraid of nan! I was already up to my neck in nan. Might as well lift my feet and let the river take me; learn to swim. Yes. I did want the blues! I wanted to swallow them, succumb to them, bathe in them, live them. What did I have to live for? Mother Ann? There is no Mother Ann. There is no God. There is no heaven. Verity, I thought, there is not even you, not any more. But there is music. There is the blues.
And so I stepped next to Alma and put my hand on hers.
The blues had no taste, no flavor. They were heavy and silky on my tongue as she watched me down them with her dark eyes after she unscrewed the cap. The small holder was carved with tiny African symbols.
"Keep it," she said, and I felt then the irrevocableness of it all wash through me. Her eyes turned kind and she whispered, as she caught my hands and held them tight, "You won't regret it. I promise you. You have the history of your country inside you now. The true history. Even though you are not black. You are closer now to understanding. Maybe as close as a white person can be." She looked at me and her look went deep inside. "You are the horse. The blues is the rider." I didn't understand. Not then.
"Thank you," I remembered to say, and when I saw her face I knew it was the right thing.
Copyright © 1997 by Kathleen Ann Goonan. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.Back to Kathleen Ann Goonan's page
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