Читать книгу The Yazoo Blues - John Pritchard - Страница 12

I know you might think I’m lyin’, but I ain’t never been to no univers’ty or nothin’, yet I know one gotdam thing: Them tootie-frootie professors over at Ole Miss ain’t never seen a sumbich runnin’ around at night with a snake up his ass.

On the other hand, to give credit where credit is due, there is a chance some nem five-star Four-AitcH’ers down at Cow College in Starkville has. That’s because anything havin’ to do with farmin’ or with nature in general—and of course arithmetic—I’ll bet you those muthafukkas have seen it, or, if they ain’t, they sure as hell know about it. They are way more progressive, I guess you’d call it, than them hoddy-toddies over at Oxford. I’ll put my money on the Bulldogs[1] any day.

But you know how women are, over in Sledge or anywhere else. They think they know you, and they don’t know the gotdam half of it . . . and wouldn believe it if they did. I guess if a man growed up thinkin’ about brassieres and purses, he wouldn know much neither.

If you ask me, the only time a man and a woman are anywhere near in the same world is when they’re connected you know how. Their heads are probably still in two separate places, but their bellies ain’t. Hell, a whang is a whang, and a snatch is a snatch, and there ain’t no way you can dress em up to look like little philosophers.

Anyhow, Sledge is one nem little fallin’-down, broke-dick Delta towns over there along the Yellow Dog.[2] And ever’ time I go over there, I think about three things. One has something to do with the nature of all them little towns along the Dog; another is how there used to be more woods and now there ain’t hardly none; and the third thing I think about is the Coldwater River and the Yazoo Pass.

I guess I knew about what every other sumbich down there in the Delta knew about the Yazoo Pass and the Yankees: namely, not fukkin much, at least not till some years ago, when Voyd and me was down by Uncle Hinroo’s—which iddn what it used to be, which was a tonk, but now it’s a place where you can take your mama or where you’d go eat supper if you couldn get in Katherine’s—down on Moon Lake, and that ain’t got nothin’ to do with Mhoon County, because it’s a whole nother fukkin word entirely. Plus, Moon Lake ain’t even in Mhoon County. It’s south of Lula, in Coahoma County.

Course they say, back in the twenties, before my time, Uncle Hinroo’s was the Moon Lake Casino, and then it was the old Elks’ Club or vise-a-fukkin-versa, but in my day it was just a juke joint, and that was that. If you went there, you was real lucky if “Sno-Cone” Cohee didn’t beat your ass—for the same reason some other world-famous sumbich said he climbed a gotdam mountain: cause the sumbich was there.

But all that’s in the past, and Sno-Cone is dead. Some puny little fukka one night had enough of the “Snoke” kickin’ the shit out of him, so without sayin’ a datgum word, he went home, got his twelve-gauge, loaded it with double-ought, and then he come back, walked up behind the ol’ Sno-Boy, stuck the barrel up his butt and pulled the trigger.

Bad as Sno-Cone was, I didn’t never think he deserved that, but you just can’t go on and on beatin’ the shit outta people for no good reason and not expect something to happen to your ass.

Not much happened to that little fukka that killed him, though. Sno-Cone had too many people in the right places that was glad he was gone. Still, I noticed a long time ago that, personally, I always got kind of sad in the picture show whenever the monster got killed. That’s because I understand those sumbiches. They ain’t necessarily bad, they’re just monsters, bein’ what they was meant to be and doin’ what they was meant to do. Hell, you wouldn have no show without em. Plus, things—and people—that are too nice and too peaceful tend to piss me off.

Anyway, we was down there, lookin’ around, reminiscin’ like a muthafukka about the old days when, like I just said, Uncle Hinroo’s was a place you could get caught dead in if you called the wrong sumbich a son of a bitch and he was. Then sumpn catches our attention, and we look down the road, and there’s Ottis[3] Alexander just standin’ there on the bridge goin’ over the Pass, right there at the curve, in front of the old bait store where you used to be able to rent a rowboat, which is closed now because all them farmers and lake-house owners killed all the fukkin fish with sewage and crop chemicals by letting it all wash into that beautiful-ass lake without giving a single ballscratchin’ thought to what they was doin’, or bygod I know they wouldn have done it.

But they did, so there ain’t no fishing, and no boats to rent neither, down there no more. Well, I expect there’s something up under the surface of the lake, probably just a’crawlin’ along through the mud on the bottom. I wouldn want to see it. No sir-fukkin-ree. It gives me the creeps just to think about it, and I guarantee you it ain’t one nem two-hunnuhd-pound alligator snappin’ turtles. Actual alligators of course are only a once-in-a-while thing at Moon Lake. They generally start gettin’ common about eighty miles down the road . . . although, as I said, occasionally, one’ll pop up around here, in Mhoon County—even though there’s always been some since anybody can remember over at Hinchcliff and all in nem sloughs around Marks and Lambert, and, I hear, down at Stovall as well—over on the Old River—and those big-ass muthafukkas builds nests and lays eggs and the whole fukkin alligator thing, plus those sumbiches get to be over thirteen feet long, and they can move quicker’n a lunchtime fuk and will flat come up after your ass if you mess with their nests. Here, let me get my billfold out—I got a Kodak of one. I call em polar-gators because these muthafukkas I’m talkin’ about live on the absolute furthest mos’ northern edge of their gotdam range, although I do hear you can find em up even higher, all the way up to the top of North Carolina on the East Coast. Well, I ain’t never been there, but I saw a thing about em on TV.

Anyhow, these sumbiches is some serious lizards. One of em over just east of Belen bit the shit out of a friend of mine’s truck. Tore that muthafukka up. He had to explain five times to the service manager at the dealership what happened. A lot of people who live in town don’t know what the fuk’s out there around em. And if they did, they’d think they was in Jurassic-ass Park.

But, about Moon Lake, the good news is I’m told the fish are comin’ back, which means, I guess, so will the people. I don’t know what they’ll do about that other thing down there on the bottom. It’ll probably stick its head up one day and eat a bass boat and some muthafukka from Meffis.

Anyhow, we said, “Hey, Ottis! What the fuk are you doin’?” And he said, “Well, Junior Ray, I’m thinking about the Yazoo Pass.”

He was standin’ right over where the Yazoo Pass, itself, goes east out of the lake. And I didn never know till that very day, talkin’ to Ottis, that the Pass comes into the lake way on around to the right—if you’re lookin’ out at the lake from Uncle Hinroo’s or the bridge over the Pass—and down toward the levee and that, back before the Civil War, durin’ high water, river boats used to use it all the time to get way back up into the Delta so, as Ottis put it, they could “serve the plantations.” In a way, Moon Lake is just a kind of wide spot on the Yazoo Pass, if you want to think of it like that. And I do.

“But,” said Ottis, “the state built a levee in 1853, and that cut the Pass off from the Mississippi River and vice versa. The levee blocked the entry to the Pass, so, after that, them steamboats couldn use it no more to serve all them isolated plantations back up in the Delta. You see, before the levee cut off the Yazoo Pass from the Miss’sippi, all them riverboats had to do—durin’ high water—was steam out of the Mississippi into the Pass, chug up and across Moon Lake over to where the Pass went out, and then they could go east into the Coldwater, on into the Tallahatchie, and, after that, into the Yazoo at what would later be present-day Greenwood. Plus, in so doin’, they could cover a helluva lot of the Delta—and come right out into the Mississippi again, just above Vicksburg! . . . which was why, in 1863, the Yankees thought about usin’ the Yazoo Pass durin’ the Vicksburg campaign.”

“But further,” I said, catchin’ on real fast, “them sumbiches had to blow the levee first.”

“Natchaly,” Ottis said. “And they did it on February the third. Lieutenant-Colonel James Wilson said it was like lookin’ at Niagara Falls, and it took four days for the water in the river and the flood on this side of the levee to even up. That musta been sumpn to see.”

“Oh,” said Voyd, which meant he wuddn really listenin’.

But I was. It turns out that Ottis had got hissef all involved with this one tee-niney episode of the whole Civil War. He’d even gone over to Ole Miss and took a buncha college courses on the history of the War Between the States, till finally, so the story goes, the professors had to just say to him one day that if he was goin’ to go to school there, he had to take courses in other stuff, too, but he wouldn do it, so that was that. Them sumbiches over at the uni-fukkin-versity was too smart just to be inter-rested in one little ol’ thing about something. And they didn’t see how this one teeny-ass little piece of history could be worth some muthafukka devotin’ a whole lifetime to it. But, hell, it was his life, and, Chreyest, it was history!

However, to them pasty-lookin’ little diklikkers over there, unless it’s some useless de-tail they’re interested in, they’re not gonna have shit to do with it. Hell, one nem coksukkas wouldn even get in the car with Ottis and ride over to Moon Lake to take a look at the Pass. He “didn’t see what purpose it would serve” because, in his view, “the ‘episode’ was such a minor event of the time and had little to do with the outcome of the conflict.”

That’s what he thinks. If he believes that six thousand[4] Yankee soldiers and sailors in thirty-two[5] fukkin steamboats—which, accordin’ to Ottis, “Each was supposed to be just under 180 feet long but at least one of em, The Rattler, was two hundred feet long,” and that ten of em, leadin’ the way, was fukkin battleships: namely, “two r’nclads, six tin-clads, and two steam rams”—if that goggle-eyed, pipe-puffing muthafukka thinks all that ordinance, smokin’ and churnin’ across Moon Lake, is a “minor event,” I’d sure like to have tickets to a major one. That just goes to show you, readin’ too much’ll fuk you up.

Anyhow, after listenin’ to Ottis, I got a brand new slant on things. Next to planters and bankers, I’m about to add a whole new group to the All American Ass’ole Association, and that’s them fukkin professors. Hell, Ottis woulda made ten of them sumbiches.

Course some reading is okay, and one of the major facts I got from Ottis, who got it from James Truslow Adams’s book, The March of Democracy—which is a multi-fukkin-volume set of books—was that the North had nineteen million white men available for duty, and the South only had five million. He said they woulda had five hunnuhd thousand more, but that number was mostly them hillbillies over in the mountains who for one reason or another decided to fight on the side of the Yankees.

As it turned out, only about 1,750,000 diklikkers in the North signed up, whereas some 800,000 Rebs—near one-fourth of the available white men—enlisted, so that you could say almost all the worthwhile sumbiches in the South were out there puttin’ their ass on the firing line. In the North it was a different story altogether. They didn’t ante up but about two-nineteenths of their men, and 100,000 of them was niggas. I mean, what the hell. Them Yankee ass’oles didn’t stand to lose nothing except a few fukkin states which they didn’t give a shit for nohow. At least, as I understand it, those abo-whatchamacallit-litionist coksukkas up around Boston didn’t. Them sumbiches hated the fukkin planters worse’n I do and woulda been just as happy to have seen em all th’owed smack-ass into the Guffa-gotdam-Mexico.

As I indicated, Ottis didn’t much give a shit about anything else as far as the War Between the States was concerned, and that greatly disturbed the good doctors over at the University. They wanted him to be more interested in the “economic aspects of the period and the wider scope of the war.”

Fuk that. I’m with Ottis. I want to hear about the shootin’. Who cares about all that other dull-ass crap? Plus, I ain’t never been to Virginia and I ain’t plannin’ on goin’. Appa-fukkin-mattox, Bull-ass-run, or any of them other places ain’t nothing to me—and they didn’t set Ottis’s hair on fire neither.

I wanted to know what was goin’ on then where I am now. Gotdam—when Ottis described it, I could see it! And I wished to hell I’da been there. I wouldna cared about no slaves—my people didn’t own none—and I sure as hell wouldna been fightin’ for them rich-ass planters. I’da done it just for the fukkin fun of it and because them Yankee sumbiches didn’t have no business comin’ down here in the first place. Fukkum.

The truth is, the so-called “Old South” wouldna done me no good a-tall. Them planters run it, and the slaves run them, and both of em looked down on my kind as nothing but scum. Well, some of us was—and still are today—because we never learned there was any other way to be, or if we did, we didn’t give a shit. In fact, Mr. Brainsong said we was that way when we was still back on the border between England and Scotland—and that a bunch of us, back then, went to Ireland but was asked to leave, so then we come over here and kept on bein’ what we was. Looks to me like that’s kind of a fukkin heritage. But it’s not what I want to talk about, and Mr. Brainsong is a whole nuther subject hissef.

Anyway—to make a long story somewhat longer—and I don’t know why Voyd and me didn’t already know all this—Ottis had done got to be the leading datgum authority on what was officially called the Yazoo Pass Expedition. One reason was that he lived right next to the Pass at Moon Lake. The other reason is that almost nobody in the rest of the South, and America, too, had ever heard of the thing.

Plus, we learned something else. The Civil War is not called the Civil War! Ottis says the official name, in the Liberry of Congress, is the War of the Fukkin Rebellion.

Stop me if I get too technical. You see, this Yazoo Pass stuff kind of got me all fired up about history. Particularly when you realize that they was some pretty big names involved in the thing at the time. ’Course, for the most part, they was all Yankees, but they was big-ass names none-the-fukkin-less. I’m talkin’ about Admiral Porter, General Quimby, and Ulysses S-hole-fukkin Grant hissef, and he was drunker’n Cooter Brown a large part of the time. Hell, his fellow officers on one occasion had to keep him locked up in the bottom of a riverboat till he sobered up so none of the enlisted personnel would see his knee-walking se’f and lose faith in his fukkin “ability to lead,” and all that crap. I think that happened down near Yazoo City somewhere. But you couldn never tell when he was gon’ start chuggaluggin’, and looks like to me he mighta did it all the time. Hell, I don’t hold it against his ass. My only quarrel with the sumbich is that he was a gotdam Yankee. Fuk a buncha habits. Everybody’s got some. Plus, I don’t know who Cooter Brown ever was, but I judge he musta been a mighty drunk muthafukka to get as well known as he did.

Anyhow, it’s the Yankees I’m most concerned with. For one fukkin thing, it was really all their show. The Confederates were mostly in the bushes, in the shadows, and in the hair on the back of the necks of those farm boys from up there in Wisconsin and Iowa and Illinois who made up the majority of the coksukkas that participated in that fantastic fukkin undertaking that took em way-ass into the Mississippi Delta, snakin’ down them little rivers that was so overgrowed on the sides the tree limbs knocked the fukkin smoke stacks off the ships, and they just had to stay in them boats with their heads down, hemmed in by high water everywhere they looked, so much so, that when they finally got down there around Greenwood, most of em couldn even get out of their “transports” because there wuddn hardly no dry land to stand on—much less to take a stand on.

But it didn’t bother them old Confederate boys. No sir-ree. They was knee deep in water in a place called Fort Pemberton, which wuddn much more’n a buncha cotton bales put up by niggas. But —and this is important—them Rebs had em a special gun.

It was a six-point-five-inch Whitworth rifle, which was a fukkin cannon, and it tore the livin’ shit outta them Yankee ships. You see, that rifled barrel could th’ow out a cone-shaped shell with more muzzle velocity than you could say Oh Hell-o Bill to. It hit one nem r’nclads—The Chillicothe—so hard that it knocked the bolts holdin’ the armor together back into the inside of the cabin, and them bolts acted just like bullets,[6] ricochetin’ around in there, and kilt a whole gang of them Yankee sailors . . . and tore up some others pretty bad. I think it’s safe to say that, apart from the Delta itse’f, it was mainly the Whitworth rifle and its fast-ass “conical shell” that turned the blue-suits back—well, that and the fact that the naval commander of the whole Yankee expedition went nuts.

Personally, that don’t surprise me none. I’ve always thought there was something about this place that makes people go crazy. Anyway, according to Ottis, the sumbich did in fact do just that. His name was Watson Smith—Lieutenant-Commander Watson Smith. All this, mind you, was goin’ on right in there on the map before where the Tallahatchie meets the Yalobooshee[7] and gets to be the Yazoo.

But them Yankees never got past our boys. Lieutenant Commander Watson Smith wouldn go no farther and was all for turnin’ around and goin’ back to Moon Lake. Personally, under the circumstances it looks to me like he was the only one who wuddn crazy. Only, Ottis says he was, and I think the commander was beginnin’ to see things that wuddn there.

The Yankee r’nclads had some big guns. They was called eleven-inch Dahlgrens, and they was protected by thick-ass armor—and I’ve got a z-rocks to prove it. But it didn’t do no fukkin good. Them Yankees didn’t never get no closer to the Confederates than eight hunnuhd yards, and the Yankee soldiers, lyin’ around back up-river in their “transports,” couldn do nothin’ but twiddle their thumbs, swat mosquitos, worry about snipers, play with their tallywhackers, and, as one famous-ass historian said, shoot at alligators.[8] I got all this from Ottis, and he told me he got some of it from that fellow in Meffis who become famous for knowin’ all about the Civil War and was on TV. I can’t ’member his name right off, but he was a good ol’ Delta boy from down there around Green-ville. ’Course, like almost every other sumbich in the world, he does live in Meffis now. But hell, if you’re a sho-nuff historian, you got to go to a lot bigger place than Green-ville. They don’t even have the airbase there no more. Anyhow, Ottis said he liked him because he trusted his ass, and he wished there was more fukkin historians like him. Well, if that’s the way Ottis feels, bygod I do, too!

[1] Mississippi State University’s football team.

[2] The Yellow Dog is a branch of the Illinois Central Railroad that runs north and south through the Delta. It crosses the Southern Railroad at Moorhead, Mississippi—“Where the Southern cross the Dog.” The origin of the name, Yellow Dog, is obscure. Speculation includes a reference to “yellow dog” scab labor and the one my father offered, which is that the nickname Yellow Dog is derived from the short-lived “Yazoo Delta” line, which later became the “Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Railroad” and was owned by the Illinois Central, which after a time bought the Southern as well. Somehow, those tracks that angled off to the east from Lake Cormorant, Mississippi, and then went south to intersect with the tracks of the Southern RR at Moorhead, came to be known as the Yellow Dog Railroad. My dad was from out of town, so that may lend some extra credibility to what he told me. Add to the pot the old story about W. C. Handy listening to a man at the train station in Tutwiler, Mississippi, singing about going to “where the Southern cross the Dog,” which W. C. handily turned into “The Yellow Dog Blues.”

[3] pronounced “Ahdis”

[4] One authority claims 4,000, others 4,500, 5,000, and yet another that there were 6,000 army personnel and does not mention how many men the navy employed on the expedition. Junior Ray’s penchant for excess attracted him to the higher number. And, yes, it is true that Junior Ray has a “z-rocks” to prove what he wishes to exist; it is also true his “z-rockses” reflect the imperfection of serious scholars and the nature of history in general. Junior Ray has said: “These fukkin sumbiches who wrote those books can’t say the same thing twice, and it ain’t even Bible times. I’mo do what I was advised by a cheap-ass bottle of scotch whiskey I bought once. Them bottle-labels all say ‘By appointment to his fukkin majesty the king or the queen or the kiss-my-foot, but the bottle I bought said, on that little wavy thing down at the bottom of the official coat-of-fukkin-arms: ‘You be the judge.’”

[5] Twenty-three may be a more accurate number. Studying his “z-rockses,” I have found only two figures for the number of army transports, 12 and 13, which, when added to the naval portion of the operation, would come out about 23, excluding the two coal barges.

[6] Library of Congress: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, Chapter XXXVI, Series I— Volume 24, Part I: “Naval Forces on Western Waters” (January 1–May 17, 1863), 270–273. The report is written by Jas. P. Foster.

[7] Yalobusha River, fr. Choctaw Yaloba/frog + Ushi/child = tadpole.

[8] Shelby Foote, Civil War, a Narrative, Vintage Books edition, 1986, p. 205: “ . . . the men aboard the transports and gunboats slapped at mosquitoes and practiced their marksmanship on alligators . . . ”