Play Pretty Blues. Snowden Wright

individual had a touch of the simian about his personage. He smelled like a long day.

      “Is your husband Charles Dodds?”

      “Yes.”

      “Did he deliver a shipment of furniture to the Tallyho Plantation?”

      “Yes.”

      “Are you the woman they say has a talent for healing folks?”

      “Yes.”

      “Do you consider your husband a faithful man?”

      Noah’s clodhopper kept Julia from closing the door. At the casual pace of a good neighbor, he removed his hat and walked into the house. He gave his eyetooth a loud suck. He wandered over to the burbling pot, removed the lid, and lowered his nose into the steam. Julia liked to have died. Somehow she managed to say, “What do you want from me?”

      “What do I want, Miss Julia?” Noah Johnson undid his top buttons and placed his hat on the table. “I’m here for some medicine. Got me an ache only you can fix.”

      Julia told him she didn’t want her children to hear.

      Around midnight Charles decided it was safe for him to leave Mary Thorne’s house. Sickle moonlight cut the starless sky. Neap fog clung to the wet ground. Over the past three hours, Charles had sat in mud and stared at nothing as Franklin Marchetti came to his right mind, panicked, paced, prepared, and left the scene of his crime. Charles considered this moment his only chance for escape. There would be no time to say goodbye to the woman who’d been his lover for seven months, three weeks, and two days.

      He could remember the exact date of their first encounter because it coincided with Ash Wednesday. The Marchetti family was Catholic—a faith upheld by a small but substantial enclave around Hazlehurst, in much the same way Judaism was around Meridian—but only for the holy days. Every year the family would spend Mardi Gras with their kinfolk in Louisiana, and every year their house would remain empty for at least a fortnight. On the first day of Lent in 1910, Charles Dodds and Mary Thorne had left their sweat marks on every surface of the Marchetti mansion, including the crisp linens of the master bedroom and the yellow wallpaper in the corridors and the checker cloth on the kitchen table.

      The memory of their trespass stuck with Charles as he followed the dirt path to his wagon seven months later. The affair had not been his only mistake. Trust us. After a long while spent lost, his boot heels slipping like ice skates on dewy grass, his pant cuffs snagging like fish hooks on scrub brush, Charles finally found his wagon in a meadow of cattails, butterweed, azalea, and goldenrod. The horse team’s breath chuffed against the warm night air. Charles initially planned to return home as usual, but instead he decided to leave town for a few days. This tactic would prove lucky. At the same time Charles traveled north to Jackson, where he intended to stay with his cousin over the weekend, Franklin Marchetti explained to the county sheriff not only the circumstances of his invaluable and irreplaceable house servant’s death but also to which family the sheriff owed gratitude for his recent election to public office.

      “Yes sir, Mr. Marchetti,” said the sheriff, whose chatty wife later gave us a thorough account of the conversation. “I’m your man.”

      “That is music to my ears.”

      Franklin told the sheriff that Mary Thorne had been having regular relations with a disreputable black man who’d been on the property earlier in the evening, but Franklin chose not to mention his recent dispatch of Noah Johnson to check on the welfare of the disreputable black man’s wife. Conclusions were drawn without discussion. The warrant posted countywide for Charles Dodds’ arrest did not have to describe him as armed and dangerous, a murderer and a rapist. All of those details were gotten across by the phrase, “Negro at Large.”

      Over the last hours of night, a vigilance committee, which consisted of drowsy field hands from nearby plantations, deputies, councilmen, lawyers, and tipsy patrons of the local bucket shop, began a scour of Copiah County. They would never find the culprit. At the encroach of dawn, Charles reached his cousin’s place of business, The Dum Dum Inn, a bawdy house located in the northwest section of Jackson. Its proprietor, Jeremiah “Slim Pick” McDonald, patted the fugitive’s back. He told Charles, “About time you made time.” Always one for family.

      Jeremiah did right by the cousin from his mother’s side, giving him a soft bedroll, any choice of whore, and three squares daily. Charles declined the whores. Every morning he drank bad coffee with his cousin next to an unlit four o’clock stove, and every evening he drank good whiskey with a regular john prior to an eight o’clock sunset. He lost three pounds in as many days. He grew the patchy rudiments of a beard. One of the Dum Dum’s girls, Liza Mae Andrews, saw him on multiple occasions clutch a woman’s garter to his damp face. She recognized the lacy item from page sixteen of the Sears Roebuck catalog. Liza Mae incorrectly assumed it belonged to Charles’s wife.

      On his fifth day from home, Charles received a Western Union telegram sent by Julia. “marchetti paid visit STOP why did you leave without word STOP children miss you STOP me too STOP bank foreclosure on land.” It became clear in further messages over the wire that Franklin Marchetti and his brothers had upheld the grudge against Charles Dodds and his family by hiring plug-hat bagmen to harass the household about Charles’s location and by asking the Planter’s Union Bank to foreclose on the family’s outstanding loan. Charles took the serious news in kind. He understood himself to be a gone case, thought on the situation, felt a penitent resolve, and chose to begin another life upcountry. He hitched a ride in a Model AC runabout to Union Station on Central Street and boarded a northbound 2:20 coach on the Tennessee line of the Illinois Central System. He exited the train in Memphis and rented a house on Handwerker Hill. He adopted the name of Spencer. He earned money through carpentry. Within the year he had met a local seamstress named Serena Daniels and would eventually have two healthy children by her.

      Only on rare occasions did Mr. C.D. Spencer of Memphis, Tennessee, communicate with Mrs. Julia M. Dodds of Hazlehurst, Mississippi. Their paucity of correspondence has given us a window into the decline of their relationship. All throughout the first four and a half months of their separation, Charles was barely able to send Julia enough money to rent a room at the cheapest hotel in town. Julia did not tell Charles of her illegitimate pregnancy. Charles did not tell Julia of his common-law marriage. All throughout the second four and a half months of their separation, Julia often raised a lethal dose of laudanum to her lips but always succumbed to the impossible compulsion for survival. Charles sent for his children. Julia said goodbye to her children. Only two of them were left when she went into labor.

      The year of 1911 was an eventful one. On December 14, Roald Amundsen, key figure in the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, led the first expedition to reach the South Pole. On March 25, the famous fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory killed 146 people. On November 11, the Great Blue Norther of 11/11/11, biggest cold snap in US history, caused record highs in the afternoon and record lows by sunset, frosting flower beds only recently come into bud and bursting pipes in the few houses with waterworks. On March 8, International Women’s Day was celebrated for the first time. On October 24, Orville Wright flew through the air for nine minutes and forty-five seconds in a glider at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, setting a world record that would stand for a decade. On July 24, Hiram Bingham rediscovered Machu Picchu. On August 22, da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre. And on May 8, 1911, Robert Johnson was born a bastard.

      His name at birth was Robert Leroy Spencer. Despite the conditions of Julia’s delivery—teeth marks perforating a leather strop, wooden forceps eddying in pink water—Robert came into this world void of any real physical harm. Covering his face was an amniotic caul, and covering his retina was a mild cataract. The first time his mother held him in her weak arms, however, she focused on the former rather than the latter. Cauls ran in her family. At the time of her recovery, senses intact and mobility firm, Julia let the caul dry until it was a hard sheet and spread it onto a crude block of heartwood and set it in place with silver hobnails. She would eventually take the plaque to her grave in a colored-folk cemetery outside Commerce, Mississippi.

      Bessie and Carrie, the two daughters left of Julia’s estranged husband, gave their hands