Table of Contents
Stop Breakin' Down Blues
Walkin' Blues
PLAY
PRETTY
BLUES
PLAY
PRETTY
BLUES
SNOWDEN WRIGHT
Engine Books
Indianapolis
a novel of the life of robert johnson
Copyright © 2013 by Snowden Wright
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are
either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
Also available in eBook formats from Engine Books.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ISBN: 978-1-938126-10-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013935829
Part One
“Honeymoon Blues”
The first time Robert Johnson died he wasn’t Robert Johnson. On a dog day in the summer of 1928, as then heard by two of us and as later verified in newsprint by all six of us, a man fitting his description walked into the Sparks Farm Cotton Gin five minutes before it was demolished by dynamite. The man who walked in the front door was called Robert Spencer. The man who snuck out the back door named himself Robert Johnson.
We have spent the past seventy years searching for him. Time and again, he has evaded our pursuit. Time and again, he has given us but sight of his ghost. We have questioned locals and stapled signs to phone poles. We have thumbed through classifieds and whittled cryptic on bathroom walls. We have dry-rubbed headstones, placed wires statewide, and notified the sheriff. We have caught glimmer of his coattails, found footprints in red mud, and heard his laugh peal from a passing sedan. We have convinced ourselves he’ll send word. We have lied to his children. His name may not be the same to all of us—Mary Sue called him Caruthers, Betty called him Ledbetter—but to all of us he was husband.
Although they are by no means exhaustive, our records indicate that he was born the tenth child in a family known as Dodds, that he would eventually assume twelve separate aliases, that he officially died at least eight different times. The deaths were as fierce as his talent. In 1932, he was found straddling the bowl in an Arkansas white man’s outhouse, his face dismantled by the business end of a twelve-gauge. In 1929, somewhere between Memphis and Olive Branch, he turned a stolen Model T the wrong way on a one-way street. In 1936, he was discovered on the tracks behind a railway juke joint, his head set free of its soulless coil by a Louisiana-bound locomotive. Between 1933 and 1935, he was thrice buried in graves whose stones bore only two chiseled lines, one intersecting the other, that many believe symbolized our heavenly father’s time on the cross but that we maintain, even to this day, stood for the Roman numeral representing the place our children’s father held in the lineage of his family. His guitar, as he explained to each of us in post-coital sheets, bore that very mark for that very reason. “Momma sees it from above,” he said, sweat dripping on the strings. “I know it in my fingertips.”
The last time he died would last a lifetime. It would linger seventy years beyond the date, August 13, 1938, the evening of which he played at a country dance near Greenwood, Mississippi. It would echo in the shucked chambers of our chests as we lived through wars abroad and at home, through bondage, oppression, and freedom, through poverty and wealth of kith and kin. That at the time of his death he was less than thirty miles from each of our homes, that he mentioned to more than one passerby he meant to “return to his true family,” would perpetuate forever our questions that will go, as we now suspect, forever unanswered. Did he love us? we ask ourselves to this day. Did we love him?
All we can truly know is how we felt upon hearing the details of his final performance