“My name’s Robert Johnson.” He came the closer. “What’s your name?”
“Virginia Travis.”
What he didn’t know at the time but would soon learn through conversation was that she had been born under a harvest moon sixteen and a half years earlier, her golden retriever’s name was Maybeetle Purslane Socrates, her father owned forty acres of good bottomland, her favorite flavor of ice cream was spumoni, and a childhood case of the mumps had taken her ability to hear.
“How can you tell what I’m talking at you right now?” Robert gave her a second. “How…can…you tell…what I’m…talking…at…you right now?”
“The same way I know what’s in a book,” Virginia said with laughter. She placed her index finger on the philtrum of his lip. “I know how to read, thunk you headly.”
Those last words sunk it for him. While ignoring the cat calls and dog barks from his friends, some apparently jealous of this girl’s beauty, others outright disdainful of this girl’s handicap, Robert slipped Virginia’s hand into his jittery own, walked through the lessening crowds, and entered the barn in time to witness Son House take a seat on a three-leg stool and strike the very first licks of the night. It wasn’t the only traveling band Robert had ever seen, but it certainly was a sight he’d ever laid eyes. At lead guitar, Son House, who years earlier had been a Baptist minister and who a year later would shoot a Texan allegedly in self-defense, channeled hellfire into his performance, hands nothing but a confusion of strum, sweat raining down on the fingerboard, eyes anything but steady in their aim, and voice railing against the authority from on high. At second guitar, Willie Brown, who would be the only person Robert Johnson said should get notified in the event of his death and who remains forever the “my friend-boy” referenced in the lyrics of “Cross Road Blues,” could hardly keep up to comment, his hands stumbling across the strings, his face contorted into concentration. The crowd sure did hully-gully on the dirt floor. They swung their arms like the tarnashun and they threw their legs like a hootenanny. One story has it that a baby fell out of its mother’s womb during a dance called Cloud Nine, the umbilical cord left to shrivel away on the ground’s layer of dust, manure, and straw. Another story has it that a steamboat deckhand bled from his ears without even a touch of soreness, the red stain on his collar so elaborately patterned that people thought he’d been given one of the Five Sacred Wounds.
“Why would you come to these things,” Robert said to Virginia, “if’ing you can’t hear what they play?”
Virginia stared at one of the barn’s supportive beams. She took Robert’s hand and placed it on the wood. The music’s vibrations shimmied through his fingertips. She pointed at the ground, stomped her foot, and nodded at the crowd. The dance’s rhythms bound up his leg. Robert shook the more at the memory of her touch.
With a smirk Virginia said she wanted to dance and left him on his own with a fresh erection. The barn was hotter than all get-out. At close to 102.4 degrees, the air could not be distinguished from the people in it, and at close to 98.6 degrees, the people could not be distinguished from the air around them. Robert lost Virginia. Her invention of style should have set her apart, but he could not tell anything from the mass of bodies in motion.
All that survives of Virginia since she went to her reward is a sepia-tone cameo found in a drab pewter locket. The very features that stand out in the small photograph, the delicate coincidence of her fingers and hair, a tiny pearl of sweat at her temple, the russet brown coordinating her skin and eyes, allowed Robert to find her in the crowd at the Saturday night ball. The flower vine of his pulse, as he put his hands at her lower back, as he set his feet in accord with her own, scaled the latticework of his desire. They danced in the company of others. They danced in the company of others. They danced in the company of others. The realization of what Robert was feeling did not occur to him against the twelve-bar arrangement so essential to the origins of blues music, nor did it occur on the 3-4-3 beat he would eventually master in his own songs. He fell in love between sets.
Outside, where they sought the cool of midnight air, Robert pulled a harmonica from his pocket, cradled it in his palms, and serenaded Virginia with sound. She held her hand against his chest so she could register the notes of music. At the end of the song, she leaned towards his ear and whispered, “Be the fool.”
“What?”
“Beautiful.”
The marriage ceremony of Robert Johnson and Virginia Travis would be held at the Commerce Missionary Baptist Church on Sunday, January 21, 1929.
What little we know of Robert and Virginia’s life together was drawn piecemeal from our husband at those rare times of his capitulation to sorrow, remembrance, and whiskey. Their marriage took a beat all its own. Although chores on the homeplace kept them apart throughout the day—her churning cow milk into sweet butter, him thatching raw burlap to burst pipes—Robert and Virginia spent their nights sitting with their hands at common prayer before the commencement of a meal, strolling the countryside in step to the songbirds of sundown, and whispering persiflage ear to ear in the candlelit hours after retirement to bed. Soon enough, one thing leading to another, another leading to one thing, our predecessor found herself in a family way.
They’d been wed ten months when Virginia went into labor. On his arrival home from work at the Abbay & Leatherman, where he still got paid a meager wage for tending the scraggly cotton fields and where he still got lost in his head arranging clumsy song lyrics, Robert opened the door of his home, sump mud stuck to his boots, guitar slung across his back, to find his wife sitting in a puddle of liquid on the floor. Her fingers were splayed across her belly. Her breath came and went on the quick. Her eyes were glazed to the light. Robert fell to his knees, took his wife’s hand, and said, “Is it time?”
She did not answer out loud. Virginia let her uncertain gaze travel from her husband’s face wrung into confusion, across her dress spotty at the waist, across her hands shaking beyond control, to the puddle on the floor marbling with far too much blood. In it she had written with her finger a single six-letter word.
Within the hour Robert had reached the doctor’s office by foot and ridden with him back to the house. Dr. Netherland brought a midwife for assistance. At the sight of Virginia on the floor, agonized, bloody, petrified, both the doctor and his midwife, the former arranging steel instruments and lifting the patient’s wet skirt, the latter fetching a white-cooper’s bucket of spring water, filling a stockpot on the sheet-iron stove, and stoking the firebox until the water hit a boil, reacted in a manner unlikely, inhuman, and unearthly in comparison to Robert Johnson, whose limbs went rigid and whose face went slack, his only audible reaction the subterranean moan of a young man come to his first absolute grief.
“You have to be staying outside,” the doctor told him. “I can’t be having you in here.”
“Why?”
“Boy.”
“Okay.”
“Miss Burchill, bring me the chloroform pills,” the doctor told her. “Help me get this woman on the bed and out of this muck.”
On the porch, Robert got a tenuous handle of his constitution, trying not to listen. A barn owl took silent flight from its perch in a lone cedar and sank its talons into some opossum whose shriek broke the sylvan calm. Junkyard dogs on a nearby farm howled and barked and growled against the darkness of cotton fields at night. A pair of whitetail fawn stood at a salt lick until the rustling of a copperhead near their feet set them to gallop