Mozart and Leadbelly Page 5

  A lady friend of mine in Washington, D.C., once told me that she knew a young African American male who would always get in an elevator whistling a tune of Mozart. I, too, like Mozart; I like Haydn, Bach, Brahms, Schubert, Chopin. I like Pictures at an Exhibition by Mussorgsky, A Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams—I like them all. And though Mozart and Haydn soothe my brain while I write, neither can tell me about the Great Flood of ’27 as Bessie Smith or Big Bill Broonzy can. And neither can describe Louisiana State Prison at Angola as Leadbelly can. And neither can tell me what it means to be bonded out of jail and be put on a plantation to work out your time as Lightnin’ Hopkins can. William Faulkner writes over one hundred pages describing the Great Flood of ’27 in his story “Old Man.” Bessie Smith gives us as true a picture in twelve lines. I am not putting Faulkner down; Faulkner is one of my favorite writers, and what Southern writer has not been influenced by him in the past fifty years? What I am saying to that young man who found it desirable to whistle Mozart in the elevator is that there is some value in whistling Bessie Smith or Leadbelly.

  After publishing Catherine Carmier, my first novel, I tried publishing my Bloodline stories. Bloodline in the title means the common experience of all the male characters from the youngest to the oldest; they were all part of the same experience in the South at that time, between the 1940s and the 1960s. I thought that the stories were good enough and long enough to make a book. My editor, Bill Decker at Dial Press, felt the same way, but he told me that I needed another novel out there before he would publish the stories. Catherine Carmier had not sold more than fifteen hundred copies, which meant that hardly anyone had heard of the book. “Write a novel,” the publisher told me, “and we will publish both the novel and the stories.” “But those stories are good,” I said; “they will make my name.” “We know that,” they said, “but no one knows your name now and we need a novel first.”

  On the plantation where I grew up in the forties were some tough people and mean people and hardworking people; they could load more cane, plow a better row, control their women—most of them would brag about having more than one woman. When the plantation system changed to sharecropping, many of these people left the plantation for the big cities, and there was always news about them getting into fights and getting themselves killed or sent to Angola State Prison for life. H (yes, that is a name) was one of those tough guys; he was tall, very handsome, and tough. He was shot point-blank when he was trying to climb through a window after hearing that his woman was with another man. Two or three months after this happened, I was back in Louisiana, and a group of us went over to the White Eagle bar. One of my friends pointed to a guy three tables away from us and said, “That is the fellow that killed H.” “What the hell is he doing here?” I asked. “Shouldn’t he be in jail?” “He was the good nigger,” my friend said. “You don’t have to go to the pen when a good nigger kills a bad nigger. A white man can pay your bond and you work for him for five to seven years.”

  I could not get that image of this guy sitting there in his blue silk shirt, blue slacks, and two-toned shoes from my mind, and back in San Francisco one day while listening to Lightnin’ Hopkins and “Tim Moore’s Farm,” I thought about this guy at the White Eagle who had killed H. Suppose now, just suppose, I said to myself, you take a guy like this and you put him on a plantation to work off his time under a tough, brutal white overseer: what do you think would happen between the two of them? I wrote a first draft of this novel in three months and sent it to New York. My editor sent it back to me with this note: “I liked the first part of your manuscript; I liked the second part of your manuscript. However, the two parts have nothing in common but the characters. In the first half you have a tragedy; in the second, a farce. Go back and do it one way or the other; stick to tragedy.” I wrote him back, “But the State of Louisiana did not see this as a tragedy. I have proof of that.” Bill wrote back, “Too bad for the State of Louisiana.”

  And he was right about the novel. The first half was serious, the second was not. But I thought that if the State of Louisiana would not take the death of this young man seriously, why shouldn’t I make a farce out of it? “Your Marcus killed another human being,” Bill said; “you let him con the people on that plantation every way that he can, then you let him escape with the overseer’s wife. No, that is not right; he should pay, or in this case let’s take a different route.” What happened in reality was that I rewrote the novel in three months and sent it back to Bill. He said that I had improved it 100 percent, but he told me to run it through the typewriter one more time, and he would publish both the novel and the Bloodline stories.

  Bloodline is the beginning of going back into the past. I realized after writing Catherine Carmier that I had only touched on what I wanted to say about the old place and the people who lived there. My own folks are African, European, and Native American; they had lived in the same parish for four generations before me. My siblings and I are the fifth generation, and my brother’s children are the sixth. There are no diaries, journals, letters, or any written words left by the old people, but there are people on that plantation who could tell me about my grandparents’ grandparents and about the other old people of that time. Some of the stories were horrible, others were funny, but they were educational.

  Until I was fifteen, I lived with my aunt, Miss Augusteen Jefferson. Because my aunt could not go to other people’s houses, they would come to our house. They would talk and talk and talk, and I would listen. When there was no school and I was not needed in the fields, I often was kept at the house to make coffee or serve water. I also wrote letters for the old people. I have been asked many times about when I started writing, and for years I said I started at the age of sixteen. Now that I think back, I started writing on that plantation at the age of twelve. I had to be creative even then. Once the old people said, “Dear Sara, how are you? I am fine. Well, I hope you are the same,” it would take them the rest of the afternoon to finish composing that letter. So I learned to write what I thought they would like to say and to write it fast, if I wanted to join my friends and play ball or shoot marbles.

  Not very long ago in Mobile, Alabama, a reporter asked me about what I thought of the minority students who did not want to study dead white writers. I told him that I learned a lot from the works of dead white writers, especially dead white European writers such as Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, and James Joyce. These are the writers whose work I studied as a student at San Francisco State in the fifties because there were no books in the curriculum by black, Asian, or Hispanic writers. And I told him I could understand the anguish of these young people for wanting to read the work of their own people. I said what the curriculum should include is works by live and dead African American writers, live and dead Asian writers, and live and dead Hispanic and Native American writers, as well as live and dead white writers.

  While I was a student at Stanford in the late fifties, my writing professor, Wallace Stegner, asked me, “Who do you write for? Who do you want to read your book?” “I do not write for any particular groups, Mr. Stegner,” I said, “I have learned too much from other writers, American and European, writers who definitely were not writing for me or about me.” “Maybe not for you, Ernie, but many had a particular reader in mind. Now let’s say a gun was put to your head and that same question was asked, ‘Who do you write for?’ ” “Well, in that case, Mr. Stegner, I would probably say that I write for the black youth of the South to let them know that their lives are worth writing about, and maybe in that way I could help them find themselves.” “Suppose a gun was still at your head and you were asked for another particular group you wished to reach.” “Well, in that case I would say that I also write for the white youth of the South to let them know that unless they know their neighbor of over three hundred years, they know only half of their own history.”

  A VERY BIG ORDER: RECONSTRUCTING IDENTITY

  A fifteen-year-old boy is standing on a riverba
nk in South Louisiana with a worn-out leather suitcase at his feet and a white pocket handkerchief in his hand. There is no way he can possibly imagine what he will be forty-one years and four months later, in December of 1989.

  He is tall, thin; he is worried and frightened. But he continues to stand there as steadily as his legs will allow, because he knows he must go. He must go not only for himself, but for the others as well, because he will be the first male in the history of the family to go away and finish school. It had been planned by the others—if not planned, dreamed—long, long before he was aware of it and definitely long before he was aware of who he was.

  There are others about him, his brothers and friends. They are not leaving home, so they are much more relaxed: they can play, chasing one another alongside the highway and up and down the riverbank.

  Where the boy stands, he can see the road from which he has just left—the quarter. He cannot see his own home—it is too far down into the quarter—so he cannot see the old people who must still be sitting out on the porch with his aunt.

  An hour ago he was packing his suitcase to leave. The few pieces of clothes—two shirts or so, but no more than three; two extra pairs of pants, underclothes, and an extra pair of shoes. Then there was the food that the old people had brought him, fried chicken, bread, tea cakes, pralines, probably oranges, and some unpeeled pecans. After he had finished packing, he tied up the suitcase and looked around the room. His ancestors, who had once been slaves, lived, if not in this house, then in one just like this one in the quarter. (He would be told that much later by a man who had spent all of his life here.)

  The bus came around the bend of the road and he waved his handkerchief, and when the bus stopped he climbed on with the suitcase, and after paying his fare, he went all the way to the back of the bus where he was supposed to go, passing under the little signs hanging over the aisle that read “White” and “Colored.” He must have found a seat because he cannot remember standing all the way to New Orleans, where he would take a train to California. But he can remember that until he got to Southern California he saw no other white person in his car except the conductor. When he changed trains in Los Angeles, he noticed the different races together.

  His mother and stepfather now lived in government-subsidized projects in Vallejo, California. In the projects were blacks, whites, Asians, Latinos—all the groups, races, who were Californians at that time. He got along with the blacks immediately, but it took him a while to get up enough courage to approach the others. He watched them play basketball, football, tennis. He had never done any of this, so he watched them. Eventually he would be a member, but now he stood back and watched everything that was going on around him.

  One day while he and one of the Asians stood on the sidelines watching a football game, the Asian said to him (and he still cannot recall what brought it about) that he, the Asian, was not as good as white people are, but better than blacks, because blacks had not contributed anything to civilization. They, he and the Asian, were watching a football game, and from what he could see of the game, the black kids were holding their place as well as or better than any of the other group. So what was this little fellow talking about?

  He had never thought himself less than anyone else, nor better. He had come from a world where the two races, white and black, were separated, but he had never thought he was less than anyone else. He had always carried his share of the load. He had gone into the fields at eight years old, and he could do as much work as any other eight-year-old could do. He had gone into the swamps at eleven or twelve, and he could pull the saw as well as anyone of that age could. So he had never thought less of himself than he did of any other. There were those who were stronger than he, those who were better ballplayers and marble shooters than he, but he was better in other things than they were—reading, for example; writing letters, for example. So he had never thought himself less. So what was this little fellow talking about?

  Once upon a time there was a tall, slim, frightened black boy who sat in the back row of all of his classes in California. Once he was called on to explain what he knew about the American Civil War. None of his teachers in the South had ever mentioned the Civil War to him that he could remember, and he thought his instructor had asked him what he knew about the silver war. He did not know anything about a silver war either, but he talked about a minute through the laughter of his classmates—until the instructor told him to sit back down.

  This same boy was also told by other recent black migrants to California that you were never supposed to tell people you came from the country. Best to say you don’t know a thing about picking cotton, or chitlins, beef tripe, watermelons—and all the rest of that country stuff like pig feet, pig lips, pig ears, pig tails. And you came from New Orleans—and never say N’awlens. It’s New Or-lea-ans. Which he tried to do for several months—until someone asked him about Bourbon Street. He knew nothing about Bourbon Street, and he realized that to go on lying to others meant lying to himself. Not only was he lying to himself, but he was also denying knowing the others, the ones he had left, and wasn’t that the same as denying who he was?

  But it seems that we’ve skipped too far ahead. A while ago we were concerned with a young man who was searching for that elusive “I.” Part of it he found by reading American, Russian, and French literature. Now he had to sit and think: how could he relate this to the lives of his ancestors and to the people whom he had grown up around; how to articulate their, his own people’s, experience; how to articulate thoughts that they had been denied to articulate for over three hundred years? There were those recent migrants to the West who told him that digging into the past would be embarrassing, too painful; forget the past. But he wanted to become “I.” And to do that meant to confront the past.

  An interviewer from one of the more popular magazines would ask him one day, “What book of all those you read helped you to become the person you are today?” After thinking awhile, he shook his head; he didn’t know. “Maybe it was the one that was not there,” the interviewer said, “and you felt that you had to put it there.”

  His first effort as a writer was a love story between light-skinned and darker-skinned blacks, whose religions were Catholic and Protestant. He knew something about each because he had both in his own family. After five years of wrestling with the idea—articulating it was the problem for him, so as not to embarrass anyone—the book, or one little chapter, as he would call it, was finally accepted for publication. In the book he would have the main character say, “I feel like a dry leaf, broken away from the tree and now drifting with the least bit of wind toward no true destination.”

  In each of the following books he found that he was moving farther and farther back into the past until he realized that to find the tree from which the leaf had been broken was to go back to those who sat out on the porch the day he left. What were they talking about that day while he was inside packing? What did they talk about the day before, the year before, years and years and years before? Because his aunt was crippled and could not go to them, they came to her, summer and winter, day and night, weekdays as well as weekends, and talked. Sometimes in English, sometimes in Creole; sometimes their voices would hush when he came into the room. What was so secret, so painful that they did not want him to know? Why did they say it was none of his business when he asked the question?

  His aunt as well as many of the others were dead by now—twenty years later. He went to the younger ones, their children, their nieces, nephews, and asked could they recall a phrase the old ones liked using or a song they liked singing. Was there a Bible they liked holding even though they did not know the words, or a hymnal they had saved even though they could not read a verse?

  Recently, at a high school in Lafayette, the writer was asked by a white student what was an American. The writer told the student that he had been searching for that answer for nearly forty years now. The student asked, “Do you think you will ever find out?” The writ
er said he did not know, but he could not think of anything else more important in his life to do. The student said, “Well, I sure got a lot out of Miss Jane Pittman.” The writer asked him what did he get. The student said, “Well, er, I, er, er—well, she made you think.” Good, the writer said. That’s good.

  BLOODLINE IN INK

  I left Louisiana for California in August 1948, not with a chip on my shoulder but with a block of oak wood in a sack on my back. I didn’t know what it was, its meaning. I only knew it was there, and it was heavy.

  I decided I would try my hand at writing. Writing a book shouldn’t be too difficult; look how many books there were in the public library.

  I began by writing longhand, just as I still do with the first draft. Then, in the summer of 1950, I convinced my mother to rent me a typewriter. I had gone through my book in longhand; now it was ready for typing. I knew absolutely zero about typing. Later, it would be proven that I knew even less about writing a book. Anyway, my mother rented the typewriter for me that summer of 1950, and for twelve hours a day I pecked and pecked with my right index finger. (I should mention here that my mother had had a baby in ’49, and I had to babysit and write my novel all at the same time that summer of 1950.)

  So I did everything to keep Michael asleep while I worked on my novel. I found that if I kept something over his eyes awhile—my fingers, preferably (I only used one hand while typing, so the other one was always free)—he would eventually go to sleep, giving me time for my work. Later that summer, I wrapped up my manuscript and sent it on to New York. My little package probably looked more like a bomb than like a novel to the New York people, because it was returned to me later. And I took it to the backyard and burned it in the incinerator.