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If I Don't Go Crazy
David Kirby
There's a sheriff's car parked near Emerald Mound,
and the deputy is looking down at his lap and smiling,
which means he's probably doing what everyone else is doing
these days, that is, texting, though I think he's knitting a quilt
out of the scalps（头皮，战利品） he's taken off travelers like me:
with a blue flashing light, pulling people over and shooting
them for fun, like the men who lived in caves on the Natchez
Trace in the day and who killed travelers for money and then
Historian Robert Coates says these men would have been
like others if they'd stayed back east, though once they entered
the wilderness3, they opened their own hearts
to the dark heart of the continent, breathed in its perfumed
and revealed by their violence how different they were
from other men, and I like this, it makes sense,
but I wonder if those men might not have been okay if they'd just
had girlfriends. It's one big black and white movie
when your baby's not in the picture, that's for sure:
promoter Dick Waterman wakes one morning to the sound
and singing softly, and when Waterman says That's
beautiful, you should play that at your shows, Williams
says Oh, no, that's not music, I'm just talking to my Hattie
Mae and telling her I'll be home as soon as I can.
What are the blues? A good man feeling bad, say some, while others say
it's a man losing his woman or the other way around.
If I don't go crazy, says Son House, I'm going to lose my mind.
Damned straight: you're working twelve-hour days
at the Dockery or Stovall Plantation6 and can barely get up most
mornings and owe more than you earn, but you can play
to time, and her name is Louise McGhee, and you tell her
you're playing at the Honeydipper this Saturday and ask
if she'd like to come hear you, and she smiles and says yes,
yes, I would, and on the night of the show, you wait for the other
fellows to finish and you get up there and say How's everybody
doing tonight and you look out into the crowd, and sure
enough, there's Louise, your pearl beyond price, your last
chance at happiness in a world where a man works like
an animal till the day he dies and lands in jail if he drinks
too much or looks at the wrong person the wrong way,
but she's with another fellow, and it's like she can't keep
her hands off him, and you grin and you sing, but inside
you're thinking, God damn every goddamned thing to hell,
and when you finish, there's some coins in your tip jar
and even a dollar bill or two, and a couple of fellows pull
but on your way home, when you know nobody's watching,
you grab your guitar like a baseball bat and swing it
against a tree. How do you write the song that gets the girl?
If we knew the answer to that one, we'd all have somebody.
Ma Rainey is a vaudeville10（杂耍，轻歌舞剧） singer in 1902 when she hears
a young miss in a little town sing what she later describes
so Ma starts doing the song herself, and suddenly America
hears the blues. A year later, W. C. Handy is cooling his heels
late one night in the Tutwiler, Mississippi train station when,
loose-jointed Negro" pressing a knife blade to his guitar
Mr. Handy doesn't know whether he's dreaming this
or not: "Going where the Southern cross the Dog,"
says the singer, that is, where the Southern Line intersects
the Yazoo & Mississippi, the crossroad, which is where,
finally, you have a choice, because you thought you were
going one place in your life and now you see you can go
left or right or even back home, if you want, but no,
you want to go someplace new, someplace you haven't
been before, even if it's way the hell out in the country,
bury folks in it these days, and the wind's picking up,
and a man steps over a fallen headstone, a big man,
and he has something in his hands, and you don't know
you with, and you can't see his face, but he holds out this thing
he's carrying, and it's a guitar, and he says, "Here,
but you'll do anything to get that woman back,
anything at all, so you rest that guitar on your knee
and you run your thumb down the strings, and a thousand birds
cry at once, and the smell of lavender rises from
the hard ground at your feet, and you think you see a line
of people against the sky's last light but you can't tell
where they're going, and you glance at the trees, and their
branches are thick with slave ships and Spanish galleons,
and you say "Who the hell are you?" and the man shakes
his head and points, and his mouth doesn't move,
and a voice you never want to hear again says, "Play."
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