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There had always been men with wooden legs or wooden crutches. I knew that an empty sleeve pinned up inside a suit jacket meant an arm had been left on a battlefield in Georgia or Tennessee. Maybelle’s handyman, otherwise a handsome old gent, had a left eye sewn shut with orange twine. The skin around that eye burned to a god-awful dry red that would have scared me if I’d been a child.
“That old man behind the bar?” said Abraham. “Before the war, he was trying to become a professional fiddler.”
I shook my head. “And now he has no chin to lean his fiddle on,” I said.
Abraham’s face broke open in a big smile. So did Moody’s and her brother’s. “Aw now, Mr. Corbett, I was fooling on you. Old Jeffrey wasn’t no fiddler. He was slingin’ beer back before the war, and he been slingin’ beer ever since.”
Moody saw the look on my face and busted out with a guffaw. “Papaw, Mr. Corbett ain’t too swift, is he?”
Chapter 37
THE CHINLESS OLD MAN RETURNED, bearing in his good hand a tray with three steaming bowls of dark gumbo.
“Look like we maybe gonna have some music too,” Hiram said, and his face lit up in a smile.
Two or three men had drifted in, still shiny-sweaty from the field. They ordered beers and shot nervous looks in our direction. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how out of place I was in here. It was the Negroes’ place; who was I to come in and sit down as if I belonged?
At least they had the courtesy to let me sit there, which would certainly not be the case if one of them tried to order a beer in a white barroom.
I was delighted to see a grizzled middle-aged fellow taking out a banjo, tuning it up while his buddy drummed his hands on an overturned gutbucket. The thin, listless woman between them waited for the banjo player to plink a little chord, and then without any introduction or ritual, she set in to wailing.
Lawd, I been blue
Since my man done left this town…
The little hairs on my neck prickled.
“You heard the blues before, Mr. Corbett?” asked Hiram.
“I have—one time,” I said. “On Beale Street in Memphis.”
Sho done been blue
Since my man done left this town…
“You like the way she sings?” Moody said.
“I do,” I said. “I like it a lot.”
Moody shrugged, like she didn’t much care which way I answered her question.
“I’m a devotee of ragtime music,” I told her.
“You a what?” said Moody. “A deevo—what did you say?”
“Admirer,” I said. “I’m an admirer of ragtime.”
“No, that word you used—what was it again?”
Moody had a bold way of speaking. I must admit I wasn’t accustomed to being addressed by a colored girl without the customary “yes, sir” and “no, sir.”
“Devotee,” I said. “One who is devoted to something. I think it’s from the French.”
“That’s a pretty word,” she said, “wherever it come from.”
He beat me, then he leave me
And now he ain’t been coming round.
