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I walked to the parlor and lifted my banjo from its shelf. I’d been trying to learn to play ragtime tunes since I first heard the new music that had come sweeping up from the South late in the old century. It was music as noisy and fast as one of the new motorcars that were unsettling horses all over the country.
I sat on the piano bench and tried to force my clumsy f
ingers to find the first offbeat notes of that skittering melody. The music seemed to be in such a hurry, but something about it took me back to a place and a time much slower, and maybe better, than any in Washington, D.C. The bumpy syncopation reminded me of the sound I used to hear coming from tiny Negro churches out in the country, in the woods outside Eudora, Mississippi, where I was born and raised.
As a boy I’d walked past those churches a thousand times. I’d heard the clapping and the fervent amens. Now that had all gotten blended in with a fast-march tempo and the syncopated melody of the old work songs. Mix it all together, speed it up, and somehow, from that corner of the South, down around where Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas meet up, the music came out ragtime.
Whenever I heard that sound, whether issuing from a saloon on the wrong side of Capitol Hill or a shiny new phonograph in Dupont Circle, it sent me out of my Washington life and down the memory road to Mississippi.
And whenever I thought of Mississippi, I couldn’t help seeing my mother’s face.
Chapter 8
EUDORA, THE COUNTY SEAT, is located in an odd corner of southern Mississippi, sixty miles east of the Big Muddy and fifteen miles north of the Louisiana state line.
My father, the Honorable Everett J. Corbett, may have been the most important judge in town, but the only truly famous citizen in Eudora was my mother, Louellen Corbett. They called her “the Poetess of Dixie.” She wrote sweet, simple, sentimental verses in such noted periodicals as Woburn’s Weekly Companion and the Beacon-Light that captured the hearts of southern ladies. She wrote poems about everything dear to the southern heart—paddle wheelers on the Mississippi, moonlight on the magnolias, the lonely nobility of the aging Confederate widow.
But that one particular day in Eudora…
I am a boy of seven, an only child. I’m downtown with my mother on a summer afternoon.
Downtown consisted of the Purina feed and seed store, the First Bank, a few shops around the courthouse square, the Slide Inn Café, specializing in fresh seafood from the Gulf, and the Ben Franklin five-and-dime—about which my mother was fond of saying, “They sell everything you need and nothing you really want.”
July was wide-open summer in south Mississippi, featuring a sun that rose early and stayed at the top of the sky all afternoon. The air near the Gulf is so humid at all times of year that you have to put your shoes near the stove at night to keep them from turning white with mildew.
I was wearing short pants, but Mama was “dressed for town”—a lacy flowing dress that swept the ground, a sky blue shawl with dark blue fringe, and her ever-present wide-brimmed straw hat. A boy always thinks of his mother as pretty, but on that afternoon, I remember, she seemed to be shining.
Our chore that day was to pick up eighteen yards of blue velvet Mama had ordered from Sam Jenkins’ Mercantile for new dining room curtains.
“Mornin’, Sam.”
“Why, good morning, Miz Corbett,” he said. “Don’t you look nice today.”
“Thank you.”
For Mama, that was mighty few words to utter. I turned to look at her, but she seemed all right.
Sam Jenkins stood there peering at her too. “Is there something I can help you with, Miz Corbett?”
“Yeah,” she said, “Sham. Oh. Excuse me.”
Something was wrong. Why was my mother slurring her words?
“Did you come to pick up that fabric, Miz Corbett?” said Sam. Instead of answering, Mama squinted hard and rubbed the front of her head.
“Miz Corbett? You all right?”
Silence from my mother. Only a puzzled gaze.
Then that slurred, weak voice again.
“When doesh shoe… when…”
“Miz Corbett, have you been… have you been drinking?”
Mama shook her head slowly and kept rubbing her forehead. I felt the blood flush through my body.
“Don’t be shilly. I sh… I… don’t…”
