We knew the exact moment the poison entered his bloodstream. Helena wrung her tablecloths bloody. Mary Sue dreamt twisted visions of God’s wrath. Claudette spiced her cornbread with tears. Betty shook the cradle with her wails. Each of us saw the same vision of our husband crawling on the ground, hands and knees minced to ribbons by gravel, bottle tops, and cockleburs. Each of us watched in our minds as the toxin seeped into our husband’s brain, causing him to howl and to froth like a dog gone rabid. His limbs contorted in all the wrong ways. His eyes searched heavenward though his face looked elsewhere. At last, somewhere in a cotton field on a sleepy Delta dawn, Robert Johnson collapsed to the ground, dead.
Each of us lived at least half a day from the fateful scene. On the night of his murder, according to the stories that reached us by week’s end, a handful of drunks managed to form a search party, but their determination proved inversely proportional to their sobriety. They dropped their torches at first light. They called it a day on principle. Most of them left in pursuit of more whiskey, while the rest returned to their homes and families. Somewhere in a cotton field outside Greenwood, Mississippi, the body of our husband lay rotting beneath the highest stalks in county history. It was never found.
We will forever ponder his accidental grave. Did the hounds not track his scent because they smelled one of their own? Is there such thing as sacred ground for a man without a soul? Did his dark skin blend into the pitch of Precambrian floodplain?
Nary a public bulletin heralded the death of the musician who would one day be called the greatest blues singer of all time. The papers issued not a single proclamation. The wireless broadcast not a single eulogium. They should have waxed sensational on his genius in the newborn art; they should have poeticized his mastery of truss rod and fret board; they should have decreed music’s end come nigh. In the weeks following his death, none of those who attended Robert Johnson’s last performance reported the incident to the media or to authorities. The perpetrator of the crime, whose guilt we still deem beyond doubt, was never sentenced to his rightful acreage in Parchman Farm. We were deprived the sweet clink of shackle and chain, the lovely still-life of his face behind bars, the elegiac spectacle of his incarceration. Only time would avenge our husband’s murder.
Since his death our lives have been guided not merely by our search for the truth but also by our desire for retribution. We have lived in the shadow of a ghost. In the first few years after his demise, some of us migrated north to St. Louis and Chicago, some of us west to Texas and Oklahoma, all in trace of the path taken by his posthumous musical influence. Claudette collected a dossier of evidence of his life and death, including fingerprints, oral accounts, facial sketches, Mason jars of sampled soil, photographs and lithographs and phonographs, vials, beakers, bottles, locks of hair hermetically sealed in Tupperware and Glad-Lock. Mary Sue, the oldest of us, seduced every headliner she heard cover a Robert Johnson song. Tabitha, the youngest, spent years harassing his murderer’s family with coins glued to their porch’s floorboards, caps twisted loose on their salt shakers, and staples removed from their Swingline. Betty sought solace in the bottle. Helena, who never forgave herself for not bearing our mutual husband an heir, eventually married a writer of crossword puzzles and gave birth to three boys named various anagrams of “Robert Johnson.”
Even though we firmly believed in his death, our lives were plagued by the possibility he may still be among us. We raided whorehouses and drug dens in the hope we might find him astride a jaybird harlot. We saw eidetic echoes of his face in our compacts. We tore the feathered phone numbers from flyers for guitar lessons, staked-out record companies, deciphered liner notes, and showed up for open-call auditions, always expecting to find him as the sinister mastermind behind the music. We berated look-a-likes on the street, yanking on their hair that had to be a wig, tugging at their noses that had to be prosthetic. We opened our mailboxes looking for postcards from some Pacific archipelago or letters with lines blacked-out by some bureaucratic censor.
Only after we had given up hope of his return, only after we allowed ourselves to believe he was dead and would remain so forever, was Robert Johnson finally resurrected by music critics, record executives, and sales charts. It all began in 1961. Rock and roll musicians discovered his newly released LPs and scrutinized his techniques on the Gibson. Historians researched his life and investigated his death. Reporters held the public rapt with the story of his bargain at the crossroads. Decades after his death, our husband was famous to all the world, and we wept with both joy and sorrow. No longer were we the sole bearers of his memory. No longer was he ours and ours alone.
Chapter One
On the morning before Robert Johnson’s conception, his mother, Julia Major Dodds, stirred a cast-iron kettle over an open flame in the kitchen of the cracker farmhouse she shared with her husband, five daughters, and four sons. She scraped muddled honeysuckle from a mortar and pestle into the concoction simmering over the woodstove. From the pantry she removed a small jar of myrtleberry oil imported by way of Hannibal, and from the cabinet she removed a roughhewn bag of locust essence cinched tight with cotton-bale twine. She added a pinch and a drop to the pot and stirred it with an oaken ladle.
Julia Dodds was a jook doctor. Any ailment suffered by the sharecropper population within twenty miles of Hazlehurst, Mississippi, home to the Dodds family and perhaps a dozen other black landowners, could be cured at the gentle, expert hands of Miss Julia. Her serums and tonics could rectify a tummy ache, the shivers, the shakes, head pains, back pains, neck pains, double vision, cottonmouth, poor taste, poor smell, hangover, and pregnancy. Her tinctures and balms could treat a copperhead bite, a mud-dauber sting, the spray of a skunk, barbed-wire gashes, briar-patch punctures, tooth rot, foot rot, crotch rot, and all manner of rash and hive. At least twice daily a hurt or ill fieldworker would knock on her door in need of remedy. Miss Julia’s years of training with her great-grandmother, a medicine woman from West Africa prone to tribal gyrations and ancestral lingo—the term “jook,” which would later be bastardized as “juke” to describe many of the venues our husband played, meant in the mother tongue “disorderly” or “infamous”—were augmented by a short apprenticeship with an apothecary on Magazine Street in New Orleans.
“What’s cooking this morning?” asked her husband, Charles. He engaged his forearm around Julia’s waist and with his lips explored the soft skin of her neck and shoulder. “Something sweet, I see. Taste like honey.”
“That ass-ugly Collier boy got the worms in his feet.”
“Now why you got to get all lovey-dovey with your talk?” Charles took grasp of his wife’s substantial thighs. “Here I am about to go to work, and you got to get all lovey-dovey with your talk. ‘That ass-ugly Collier boy,’ she says. ‘Worms in his feet,’ she says.”
Owner of a hundred acres of buckshot farmland, purveyor of homespun wicker furniture, and counsel to various overseers in Hazlehurst’s outlying townships, Charles Dodds Jr. was as respected in the community as he was adored by Julia. They had been married twenty-one years. Charles’s interactions with his wife—her collection of journals, lyrical and poetic and lovely, has proven invaluable for detail—were similar to our interactions with their son. Both men loved for love’s sake. Both men were not without a sense of obligation. Both men romanticized their romanticism. They could never tolerate silence in their lives. They would always whisper the God’s honest.
“You are the only woman I could ever give my heart,” Charles said aft of his wife’s ear. It was his daily incantation. “Don’t you forget them words.”
“Haven’t yet.”
“Me either.”
“Breakfast?”
“Got no time. Mister Marchetti said he wants his chairs delivered first thing. Have to do it myself or it won’t get done. Don’t