Читать книгу The Yazoo Blues - John Pritchard - Страница 9

My name is McKinney Lake. To clear up any ambiguity about the sound of it, I am a female, and I am just a bit younger than Junior Ray. Further, in the spirit of full disclosure, I must warn the reader that something may now have begun that was never intended by the publishers of Junior Ray Loveblood’s first interview, which was conducted by Mr. Brainsong’s nephew. That interview, which became the controversial book, Junior Ray, was—so I am told—meant mainly to gather information about our peculiar part of the nation and to provide background and substance for young Mr. Brainsong’s philological and anthropological contributions to his peculiar corner in the field of Southern culture, by locating, examining, and organizing the “notes” of Leland Shaw and by paying attention to Junior Ray’s extended account of their acquisition.

The project was a success, and that should have been the end of it. But, as a result of the attention the work received on publication, Junior Ray decided he had more to say and became almost immediately fired up to “talk another book.” In truth, he was enjoying his fifteen minutes in the spotlight. However, Mr. Brainsong’s nephew informed the publisher in Montgomery that his intense exposure to Junior Ray had affected his Weltanschauung as well as his health and that both his therapist and his Unitarian minister had recommended that he diligently avoid any further connection.

So I was asked by Junior Ray—after someone put a bee about me in his bonnet—if I would function as his facilitator on a second book. His publisher approved, and I said I would give it a shot.

My principal responsibility was to record what Junior Ray said and to offer suggestions from time to time, but I have decided to serve the reader as well by injecting perspective and, I hope, clarification through footnotes where needed. Though do not expect me to do so with young Mr. Brainsong’s eloquence.

I suppose Junior Ray can be considered part of an “oral tradition” for the simple reason that he doesn’t actually write anything, nor is anyone who knows him certain that he could.

Since failing to kill Leland Shaw and subsequently retiring as a deputy, he has become obsessed with two things. First, the Union forces’ failed but utterly fantastic Yazoo Pass Expedition in the late winter and early spring of 1863 into the watery Hell of the Mississippi Delta—our odd, oval-shaped alluvial plain, in Mississippi’s “forehead,” between an area of the state just below Memphis, at Walls, Mississippi, on Highway 61, and the mouth of the Yazoo River just above Vicksburg. Junior Ray has developed the amazing notion that he is now “a historian” and an expert on that particular Northern naval operation—complete with ironclads—in the backwaters of the Mississippi Delta during the Civil War.

Secondly, but more or less simultaneously, with Mad Owens’s self-inflicted love affair with Money Scatters—a famous exotic dancer from Tchula, Mississippi, and a former Memphis policewoman, who, as part of her deep concern for the happiness of all mankind, traded in her gun for a g-string and her badge for a splendid pair of extraordinary tits. Through his considerable imagination, Junior Ray has combined the story of that 1863 naval warfare fiasco with his contemporary account of Owens’s “exploration into the swamp of love,” much as William Faulkner paired The Old Man and The Wild Palms into a single volume, though not exactly.

I have known Mad Owens all my life, and rather well, even though he is much younger. I should mention that he and I are double-fourth cousins once-removed, which, down here, is pretty close, considering the large number of fifth, sixth, and seventh cousins we all have. It’s like Sicily.

To the average reader Mad may appear to possess almost no sense of emotional self-preservation or practical sense about anything. But Junior Ray Loveblood, in spite of his violence and profanity and sledge-hammer insensitivity, has developed a solid affection for Mad. I suppose you might call it paternal or avuncular. But the truth is Junior Ray has always held a soft spot for underdogs and the innocent, except in the case of that little episode with Leland Shaw.[1] One reason Junior Ray might feel that way about individuals who are at some sort of legitimate disadvantage is that, in them, he sees himself. It’s just a thought. But I’ve thought about it a lot.

I went to school with Junior Ray. He and I are near the same age and have been friends, in a way, since the day I entered the second grade at Mhoon County Consolidated. Junior Ray was in the second grade, too, for the third year in a row (though they moved him up later that year), where he bullied the life out of some of the softer little town boys who were scared to death of him. He was tall, loud, often barefooted in the winter, and had muscles in his arms as hard as golfballs.

At that time, Junior Ray survived in a life the rest of us could not have imagined. He obviously wasn’t much of a student, and because his family didn’t yet have running water and electricity, he always smelled like a coal-oil lamp. But he was especially nice to me, called me strawhead, and threatened anybody, young or old, who did not show me the most extreme courtesy. I’ve always loved him for that. In my view, and I am sure in yours as well, nobody should demand one hundred percent perfection out of anybody unless they can demand it of themselves. The point is, you ought not to throw somebody away just because once in a while they may seem like a monster. What kind of world would that be? We’d be without friends and have to avoid mirrors.

Still, as a woman I must seem an unlikely choice for the job vis-à-vis the book’s language and subject matter. But most people locally would not think it a bit strange. I expect they have always understood whether they wanted to or not that I never let womanhood stand in my way when it came to claiming my indelible right to this short, manifold segment in the process of Time and to this place in the mystery of Space. That’s all any of us ever have. Nor would I believe they could accuse me of ever letting my status as a female block the road for anybody else.

Even so, I am a Delta girl through and through. I did not see the allure of screwing sheep on the levee, but I knew the boys who did it and even went out with them one night, the time the whole flock ran over Brantley Duckworth when the game warden, Mr. Briarfield, showed up and threw his spot on the home team, most of whom were just standing around while Brantley attempted to bridge the chasm of the species.

He was then knocked flat into some sheep . . . “do” . . . when the lambs got spooked by the game warden’s light and the scattering heroes, who—I along with them—fled to their fathers’ cars and sped across a field toward the gravel road that would take us back to town, leaving Brantley in pursuit, hopping like a kangaroo on the turnrow, his breeches down around his ankles and the rest of him shrunk up to nothing as the game warden’s truck with its spotlight followed him at about one mile an hour and then turned off to the right, back toward to the levee, and left Brantley, the Don Juan of Livestock, standing out there in the Mhoon county darkness, rejected by sheep and man alike.

So, yes, I know all about that and because I do may be why when my name came up Junior Ray didn’t bat an eye—as he most certainly would have if I’d been one of those Chi Omega “Oouu-oouu-oouu!” sorority types who went to Ole Miss, whose blouses never wrinkled, and who only did it, and said they didn’t, real quick in the dark. Thank God some of them grow out of it and become human beings. Still it is no wonder those boys went out to be with the sheep. It was a relief from all the vivacity.

Junior Ray pretty much reports on things the way they are, but like the rest of us he sometimes tells them the way he wants them to be. I figured I had a firm obligation to the reader to keep Junior Ray in the ballpark of accuracy as much as possible. So, I have injected two or three cents worth from time to time throughout this second helping of Junior Ray’s “talking” contributions to the development of American literature.

Though the contents of this book are neither always fiction nor always fact, what Junior Ray has to tell us is nothing more—and nothing less!—than an autobiography. I mention this at the outset because the question of plot arose, and though I was convinced the issue was beside the point, I had no solid answer until I realized that Junior Ray is not merely an informant reporting an oral history but is, himself, all the elements of drama and fiction and, likewise, those, too, of a basic and recognizable reality within a subset of the human condition peculiarly bound up in a single, overwhelming persona.

Indeed, Junior Ray is plot, he is place, he is time, and above all he is character as well as theme. In terms of point of view, even I can see that he falls into the category of “limited all-knowing narrator,” although he would most likely not accept the “limited” part, even if he could admit he were. I finally understood, as Alfred Hitchcock might have put it, that Junior Ray is his own MacGuffin . . . you know, the thing in a story that’s the whole reason for the story in the first place.

I also want to inject this: I happened to be home in St. Leo during the time Junior Ray and that nitwit Voyd Mudd were chasing around after Leland Shaw. I was here the day Lawyer Montgomery, Sheriff Holston, Atlanta Birmingham Jackson—with her “entourage”—and Boneface (thank God for him) were gathered over at Miss Helena Ferry’s house. I remember it all because I was just across the street inside the new office of the Mississippi Power & Light Company, where I had gone to pay Mother’s utility bill, and I saw the whole thing in progress through the plate glass window, on the east side of the building.

People were well aware of what Junior Ray had been up to, and they were not going to let it happen. After the first two weeks of Shaw’s disappearance, almost nobody was buying Junior Ray’s crappola about public safety and “protecting folks.” Impenetrable as guys like Junior Ray are, you can usually see their insides on their outsides, like projected images of themselves moving in the opposite direction. It’s what I call “the good ol’ boy giveaway.”

It’s just that some of them you like, and some you don’t, in spite of all the reasons you should or shouldn’t. There are people who are bad all over and others who are bad only here and there. But when part of an avocado is rotten, it’s still perfectly possible to appreciate the part that’s not, depending on whether you like alligator pears in the first place. It’s up to you, of course.

That’s my story. You must continue now with Junior Ray’s . . . just the way he told it.

—McKinney Lake, St. Leo, Mississippi

[1] - A delusional, shell-shocked WWII veteran whom Junior Ray wanted to shoot, as described in his previous “memoir.”