“Charley Patton keep an eye on his fat grams?” I say.
“And how old was he when he died?”
A bad choice. I search the pantheon for a long-lived bluesman. “Lightnin’ Hopkins drank gin and fried eggs for breakfast.”
Ben shuts the seven compartments of his plastic tray. “Well then let’s get you chopping cane like Lightnin’.”
“Chopping cane?” I say. “When’s the last time you were out in the fields?”
He grins, drums his hands against his taut stomach. I pull mine in. “Don’t let’s get started on that,” he says. “What grows in Michigan?”
“Cherries,” I say, recalling seventh-grade Michigan History. “And boy when massuh found out you was eatin his crop. . .”
A knock at the door stops me cold. Most likely, it’s room service, but you never know. Ben’s always willing to let fans visit wherever he’s staying—in fact, he encourages them—and the two of us sharing a room displays the country-negro frugality that balances our garish clothes and fancy cars and creates the overall image Ben believes we must cultivate. I doubt we’ll get such a visitor now, but I creep to the door, tighten my robe and say, “Who dat?”
A moment passes, long enough to make me suspicious. I say again, “Who dat?”
This time, I hear “Room Service,” in a pleasant young woman’s voice, so I open the door to retrieve my food along with the steamed vegetables and brown rice for a man who on stage purports to smoke dynamite and drink TNT.
•••
At nine, Ben racks out—the Last True Delta Bluesman needs his eight hours—and I tip to my room to listen to Sonny Boy and examine the dates and locations of the tour. A few radio and TV interviews along the way, with most of the gigs at places we’ve played before. A lot of colleges, though it’s rare we see students. Their professors are always present, as are the record- and health-food store owners and all others who graduated but never found reason to leave Missoula, Ithaca or Athens, GA. This time around we’re the featured performers at a conference at Indiana Northern University, my first gig of that kind. We play Eau Claire in addition to Madison but will get to Detroit about half way through. Not to play, though. I need to see my mother and her husband, Grover, who are soon headed to Ghana, the motherland. She’s been planning such a trip since Alex Haley published Roots, only I bought the tickets because two years ago I couldn’t make it to their wedding. And once again, we’ll bypass Ben’s hometown of Clarksdale and the Beale Street Blues Awards, though we’re nominated for Best Traditional Act, as we are every year.
In all, of these next four months, much of my time will be spent in rooms like this one. I’ll play harp, practice to speak like a Mississippian with a high school education so I sound true to people who probably count me and Ben as the only black people they’ve conversed with. The brothers and sisters I’ll see, other than my mother and her husband, will be waiting tables or sweeping up. They won’t be in line holding tickets for the Brother Ben Show. I always assume a few are in the crowd, just outside my peripheral vision—half the time, on stage, my eyes are closed, anyway.
From my case, I take out the Military Band Hohner in G I bought for the tour and haven’t broken in yet. Its weight in my hands is a comfort as I play some Sonny Boy, “Good Evenin’ Everybody,” which was a modification of his King Biscuit Time intros. The point then for Sonny Boy was as much to sell flour as to make sounds like no one else had ever heard before. For me now, nothing feels more right than the smooth metal running cool across my lips, my tongue slapping holes to chord, my hands cupped or flapping like wings, yet I stop when my eyes open and I see my black shirt hanging on the doorknob. That’s part of the other show, the one we’ll be putting on, before and after the music. After four years, I don’t know how much longer I can keep it up. But I get to play harp. I get to play harp.
•••
First time I heard a harp was on a radio show called “Who Covered Whom.” The station was Detroit’s Cool Q 102, and I listened every Sunday so I could appear in school on Monday, dressed like everyone else in a rugby shirt and jeans and Weejuns, and talk about what records were played on “Who Covered Whom,” as if knowing Little Eva did “The Loco-Motion” before Grand Funk might obscure that I was the only twelve-year-old in Troy who was black and fatherless. One Sunday, the DJ played Slowhand Clapton’s “Eyesight to the Blind”—from the soundtrack of Tommy, a popular midnight movie among the stoner set—then Sonny Boy’s original. The sheer sound, so rough and raw and real, reached inside and shook me. I didn’t know how anyone could have made the sounds Sonny Boy did. I almost believed those trills and slides emanated from within, like song from a bird. Plus, I knew instantly, unlike with Jimi Hendrix on the same station, that Sonny Boy was black. And I wanted to learn how to kick up such a racket myself.
Once I bought my own harp and instructional books to go with it, I was soon stumbling through “The Star Spangled Banner” and “God Bless America,” meantime listening to Sonny Boy and Little Walter and wondering if I’d ever sound like them. Later, at Troy High and at Michigan State, I joined several bands—the Mr. T’s, Sheik and the Trojans, Motown Mojo, Jack and the Dull Boyz—but we sounded like George Thorogood or J. Geils. Having grown up on Apple Blossom Court instead of Dockrey’s Plantation, I feared I was never close enough to the real blues to play them. I needed confirmation of my talent but was too frightened to sit in with players who came through East Lansing and Detroit. Didn’t help that my bandmates were named Trevor and Steve and came to the blues after several viewings of The Blues Brothers. No brothers and sisters were stopping to see me either. So, two months shy of graduation, when I’d been offered a job by Loomis and Pratt, a marketing firm in Cleveland, I was confident I’d take it and keep a harp at home to play along with my Chess records on weekends.
Then came the audition announcement in the Detroit Metro Times, calling for harpists to try out for a spot with Brother Ben. I owned but didn’t listen much to his and Bucketmouth’s first album, The True Delta Blues, but like I believed Bessie Smith died because she wasn’t allowed into a white hospital and believed Tommy and Robert Johnson sold their souls at the crossroads and believed Blind Blake shot a dog and alone could ride the New York City Subway system with ease, I believed the story in the liner notes about how twelve-year-old Ben was arrested for stealing a Stella from a pawn shop, then sent up before some stern, but sentimental cracker who asked why Ben had committed such an awful transgression. “To play the damn thing,” young Ben is purported to say, a response that so tickled the judge, he said, “Then let me hear what you can do.” Naturally, Ben shook those strings so well—without even a lesson—that the charge was dropped. I believed all those stories and more, as if by learning them I might make up for my assimilationist experience and play the blues as if I’d lived them. I’m sure the twenty white cats I auditioned with in an Auburn Hills Hilton believed this tale, too, only I was chosen to play with the man. My confirmation. And my introduction to a world as much defined by manipulation as music-making. Still, backstage at our first show together, I asked Ben if the story about him and the judge was true. He didn’t even say a word right away, just tilted his head and squinted as if I were indeed the rawest negro on the block.
Now, five years later, I hold the notes of “Good Evening Everybody” as long I can before letting them go. This morning, flying from New Orleans to LAX, when I first read the polls, I believed things had turned my way. We’d finally get more than just a nomination at the Beale Street Blues Awards. I’d flash these polls before Ben and he’d agree: “You’re right, Pete. Let’s just play.”
Thank God I couldn’t hold on to such notions for long. Thank God the Last True Delta Bluesman showed me once more that this