Читать книгу Play Pretty Blues - Snowden Wright - Страница 8

Chapter One

On the morning before Robert Johnson’s conception, his mother, Julia Major Dodds, stirred a cast-iron kettle over an open flame in the kitchen of the cracker farmhouse she shared with her husband, five daughters, and four sons. She scraped muddled honeysuckle from a mortar and pestle into the concoction simmering over the woodstove. From the pantry she removed a small jar of myrtleberry oil imported by way of Hannibal, and from the cabinet she removed a roughhewn bag of locust essence cinched tight with cotton-bale twine. She added a pinch and a drop to the pot and stirred it with an oaken ladle.

Julia Dodds was a jook doctor. Any ailment suffered by the sharecropper population within twenty miles of Hazlehurst, Mississippi, home to the Dodds family and perhaps a dozen other black landowners, could be cured at the gentle, expert hands of Miss Julia. Her serums and tonics could rectify a tummy ache, the shivers, the shakes, head pains, back pains, neck pains, double vision, cottonmouth, poor taste, poor smell, hangover, and pregnancy. Her tinctures and balms could treat a copperhead bite, a mud-dauber sting, the spray of a skunk, barbed-wire gashes, briar-patch punctures, tooth rot, foot rot, crotch rot, and all manner of rash and hive. At least twice daily a hurt or ill fieldworker would knock on her door in need of remedy. Miss Julia’s years of training with her great-grandmother, a medicine woman from West Africa prone to tribal gyrations and ancestral lingo—the term “jook,” which would later be bastardized as “juke” to describe many of the venues our husband played, meant in the mother tongue “disorderly” or “infamous”—were augmented by a short apprenticeship with an apothecary on Magazine Street in New Orleans.

“What’s cooking this morning?” asked her husband, Charles. He engaged his forearm around Julia’s waist and with his lips explored the soft skin of her neck and shoulder. “Something sweet, I see. Taste like honey.”

“That ass-ugly Collier boy got the worms in his feet.”

“Now why you got to get all lovey-dovey with your talk?” Charles took grasp of his wife’s substantial thighs. “Here I am about to go to work, and you got to get all lovey-dovey with your talk. ‘That ass-ugly Collier boy,’ she says. ‘Worms in his feet,’ she says.”

Owner of a hundred acres of buckshot farmland, purveyor of homespun wicker furniture, and counsel to various overseers in Hazlehurst’s outlying townships, Charles Dodds Jr. was as respected in the community as he was adored by Julia. They had been married twenty-one years. Charles’s interactions with his wife—her collection of journals, lyrical and poetic and lovely, has proven invaluable for detail—were similar to our interactions with their son. Both men loved for love’s sake. Both men were not without a sense of obligation. Both men romanticized their romanticism. They could never tolerate silence in their lives. They would always whisper the God’s honest.

“You are the only woman I could ever give my heart,” Charles said aft of his wife’s ear. It was his daily incantation. “Don’t you forget them words.”

“Haven’t yet.”

“Me either.”

“Breakfast?”

“Got no time. Mister Marchetti said he wants his chairs delivered first thing. Have to do it myself or it won’t get done. Don’t wait up for me tonight.”

Charles made his way to the barn as Julia continued tending her poultice. Although the month of September was in its descendant, days still reached high into the nineties and nights offered little if any relief. The approaching fall would be an Indian summer. Charles grew flush with exertion and wet with perspiration as he placed three wicker chairs, one wicker table, two wicker footstools, and one wicker chaise onto the wagon bed. Each piece was his own special design. He would soak hundreds of cornhusks in sealed vats of dye and weave the husks throughout the furniture’s crosshatch of reeds and cane, creating complex patterns with variegated shades of red, green, yellow, and blue. A Choctaw tribesman had taught him the technique during the tobacco hornworm outbreak of 1895.

Charles hitched the harness and stowed a saddlebag. He palmed the reins and nickered the horses. At the start of his trip, a trail of crimson dirt in front, a sheet of overcast above, a hill of shaggy pasturage on either side, Charles resituated his position atop the wagon seat in order to glimpse his home fading in perspective. We can imagine his thoughts. He mentally prioritized the necessary house repairs between the most urgent and the least, including the weathervane that had bent in last month’s high winds and the clothesline wire that had snapped in this month’s high heat. He decided to stake an area of the backyard for a sunflower garden. He planned to fertilize the vegetable patch by Christmas. He hoped with all of his being, as he studied a wisp of smoke seeping from the clinker-brick chimney on the tin roof, as he watched his wife in stark relief crossing the dogtrot of their clapboard farmhouse, he hoped on his life he would be able to stay true to the solemn vows he’d made to Julia on the day of their nuptials. He also resolved to fix the slop bucket in the livestock corral.

The Tallyho Plantation, 12,000 acres of cotton farmland and pine forest owned by the Marchetti family, lay in the northwest corner of Copiah County. The trip took Charles four hours. On a hummock of fertile soil, the house seat of the plantation was situated facing eastward, its back turned on a tupelo cypress gum brake in the dale below. Every member of the Marchetti family lived in a Greek revival mansion with pale Corinthian columns, and every servant of the household lived in a cluster of ramshackle tenants hidden way back in the marshy woods. Charles brought his wagon to a halt at the livery stable, knocked on the back door of the main house, removed his slouch hat from his sweaty mop, and waited with his hands crossed at the button of his breeches. A houseboy Charles had never met opened the door. One of the young man’s eyes looked to have been kicked by a mule.

“Which of the misters you want?”

“Mister Franklin.”

“I’ll get him. You stay waiting outside.”

Charles promptly slipped into the kitchen when the houseboy was gone from sight. On a butcher block near the sink sat a plucked chicken and a bowl of cornmeal. A frying pan simmered on the stove. Around the foot of the icebox lay a carpet of feathers and down. Charles walked to a door that led into a long hallway, but he chose not to explore the house any further. It would be unnecessary. At the end of the hall on the right was an antechamber with a cut-glass chandelier overlooking a twin staircase. The second step from the bottom, Charles knew, creaked loud enough to wake a light sleeper. At the end of the hall on the left was a parlor with a velveteen couch sitting next to a grandfather clock. The pendulum encased in mahogany, Charles knew, chimed the turn of an hour four minutes fast.

“What you doing in here?” the houseboy with the misshapen eye said from the door on the other side of the kitchen. “Thought I told you to keep yourself outside.”

“I know, but the—”

“Never you mind the matter. Mister Franklin’s on the front porch, wants to talk with you. No, no. Go back outside and walk around the house.”

According to townsfolk who knew him, Franklin Marchetti, younger brother of Anthony Jr. and Terrence, youngest son of Anthony Sr. and Bettina, stood five-foot-four in Jodhpur boots and weighed a hundred twenty pounds after a big lunch. He waxed his moustache with Hungarian pomade made special by his mother. His defining characteristic was a comical propensity to grab his sex during moments of confusion or pride. He was famous for his wit, which was all but nonexistent. On the afternoon of Charles’s delivery, Franklin suffered through the heat by putting himself in position to take the breeze, even lighting a special blend of cigar his oldest brother claimed mitigated overactive sweat glands. Charles waited in the front yard ’til he was invited onto the porch. Days later, we know from his official statement made to the county sheriff, Franklin Marchetti would be surprisingly forthright about his conversation with Charles Dodds prior to the incident that evening.

“Come on up here, boy,” Franklin said, his words visualized by syrupy tobacco smoke. “Heard you had a goodly yield on your place this year.”

“We did all right this year, yessuh.”

“Any conjectures on the next?”

“I got a feeling we’ll have a dry spell in June, but we’ll pull through what with July around the corner.” The smoke tickled Charles’s nostrils. “July’ll be drippy.”

“No droughts or floods in our days?”

Farmers only talk of bad fortune when times are good, and farmers only talk of good fortune when times are bad. 1910 was a good year. Franklin could not resist the urge to list all the possible disasters that might befall his cotton crop in the coming months. He mentioned every known disease: wet weather blight, nematodes, fusarium wilt, root rot, black arm, yellow arm, rust, spot blotch, the dread boll weevil. Charles refuted each one.

“You bring that renown Dodds wicker with you?”

“Yessuh. Back the wagon.”

“I’ll have my new nigger help you unload it.”

“Thank you kindly.”

It was at that moment the door to the front porch opened to reveal one of the Marchetti family’s young servants, Mary Thorne. She wore a summer frock despite the time of year. Her face and figure were beautiful, delicate, and inevitable. She gave a childish impression of concurrent servility and defiance. On her departure from the porch, after she had refilled Franklin’s sipping whiskey and after he had thanked her with a pat on the fanny, Mary Thorne caught Charles’s gaze in her own, held it steady, and allowed him to wink at her. Charles didn’t have to look in her eyes to know they were the color of chicory.

Julia Dodds spent the day making house. Along about eight in the morning, her children had emerged from their room, taken breakfast, and begun their daily chores on the farm. The two oldest rode to the commissary for fatback and sugar, the four middle children tended the lower twenty, and the three youngest scattered feed to the chickens and pigs. Julia shelled butter beans on the porch. She boiled coffee for red-eye gravy and retrieved a ham hock from the smokehouse. She scrubbed salt from the meat and let it simmer stovetop for hours. She doused hot biscuits with blackstrap molasses. Along about two in the afternoon, her children had eaten lunch on the picnic table in the backyard, collected their writing tablets, gathered their script utensils, and taken seats cross-legged in a circle around Julia on the porch. It was time for school.

During her own childhood, Julia had been given the alphabet by one Theodore Stahl, her mother’s former owner, who professed the transformative powers of language, especially amongst the “mongrel races.” That was why Julia was so steadfast in her children’s education. That was also why her journals were such a find for us. On the afternoon in question, Julia taught her youngest arithmetic, her middle children grammar, and her oldest literature. She gave rewards for right answers. Bessie and Sally, fraternal twins, got dress patterns for “Setting means time and place both.” Samuel got rose oil for “I before E except after C.” Natalie, slow in the head and given of lenience, got gumdrops for “Two plus two equals yellow.”

We have often wondered how a woman as clever as Julia Dodds could have not put together the truth about her husband. How could she have not seen through his sweet, sweet talk? Her twin daughters, Sally and Bessie, their older selves acquiescent to our questions, described her as oblivious, oblivious, oblivious. “Momma had no idea whatever,” they told us, “not even after what happen.” They were mistaken. Even though Julia most certainly suspected her husband, all of us have come to admit, she simply could not allow herself to act on those suspicions. Women always want to know, but women never want to believe.

On the fateful day in September of 1910, still and all, Julia was correct in believing her husband spent the afternoon unloading wicker furniture for the Marchetti family. He bore the chairs, table, footstools, and chaise from the wagon bed, carrying them through the house to the second-floor gallery. He took a shammy cloth to the wicker’s film of red dust. He arranged each piece to provide the best ergonomic comfort without distracting from the overall aesthetic effect. The man with only one good eye helped Charles throughout the afternoon.

“What you call them colors?”

“I named this design ‘Autumn Harvest.’ ”

“Hmmph.”

Little is known of the man who’d been hired in August to look after the plantation’s day-to-day. Born in McComb to a large family of field workers and raised on various plantations across the Pine Belt, the thirty-two-year-old was considered ruthless, authoritative, trustworthy, and discreet in his duties as one of the youngest overseers in Mississippi history. He was said to have lost the use of his eye when as a toddler he stood behind a molly in estrus. He was also said to have cost seven men the give in their kneecaps for speaking poorly of his appearance. The rumor mill has ground the rest of his biography into fictitious pulp. Some say he fought in the Spanish-American War as a “Weary Walker” under the command of Colonel Leonard Wood. Others say he died of tuberculosis at one of the few racially tolerant sanatoriums in New Mexico. Even the man’s name, Noah Johnson, is thought by many to be an invention.

It was dusk by the time Charles and Noah were done with their work. They shook hands studying their feet. Noah went back to the house for his evening talk with the boss, and Charles guided his wagon along a trail that led to the post road. He parked in a wildflower thicket hidden from sight. Over the next two and a half hours, day giving into night, light giving into dark, Charles sat by himself on a seed bag in the wagon bed. He dealt solitaire with a Bicycle deck. He drew hangman doodles with a carpenter’s pencil. At a quarter past nine, he lit a coal-oil lantern with his last match, put wheel chocks under the chassis, found a worn path in the brush, and made his way towards the servant quarters. The Marchetti family should have been done with dinner.

Mary Thorne lived in a shotgun house on the brink of a foggy slough. In the front yard, a copse of bottle trees, whose purpose, according to West African tradition, was to ward evil spirits, caught the moonlight. The glass of the bottles cast green and brown flickers on the ground whilst chiming a soft melody all throughout the deep woods. In the backyard, an army of chorus frogs sang for mates within the vicinity, each note of their call euphonized by the creak of longleaf pine. Charles knocked on the door.

“Welcome home, soldier.” Mary Thorne stood in the entry with one hand resting on her hip. “Beginning to think you wouldn’t make it tonight.”

“I didn’t know how long you’d be serving dinner.”

“They finished early.”

“Lucky you.” Charles made passage through the doorway. “Lucky me.”

We have always felt this man behaved in a manner inappropriate for the father of our husband. Charles Dodds promised fidelity to one woman and broke it with another. Charles Dodds gave his love neither singly nor solely. Charles Dodds allowed his passions to run parallel to an unworthy multitude. We have always felt our husband could have never been the son of such a man. All our worries were for naught.

Despite the low pay of most house servants, Mary Thorne’s home held all kinds of finery and frills. A swatch of Persian carpet hung from bent nails above the mantle. A hand-crank Victor collected dust in the corner. A flagon of Georgia moonshine wept condensation on the counter. Charles took two Ball jars from the shelf and poured a stiff round of drinks, the signature peach whirling in the grain alcohol.

“Sweets to the sweet,” Charles said, handing Mary Thorne her drink. They were each stung by 180-proof. “Have you been missing me terrible?”

“Hardly gave it notice.”

Charles killed what was left in his glass. He breached the gap between himself and Mary Thorne. She tasted of fruit. Charles lowered his suspenders that were given as an anniversary present and removed her pinafore that was blotchy from the evening meal. He spooled her stockings down to mid-thigh and let his fingers materialize at her undergarment. She felt of silk. At the same moment, as his lips explored the plumage on her neck’s nape and as her tongue traced filigrees along his shoulder blade, the silhouette of a man holding a lamp approached Mary Thorne’s house from the direction of the Marchetti family’s mansion. Charles noticed it first. He said, “Who do there?”

“Who do where?” Mary Thorne followed his gaze to the window. “Oh Lord. It’s Frankie.”

“Frankie?”

“You’ve got to get. Right now.”

Even before Charles could muster a response, Mary Thorne had returned her intimates to their rightful place and was shoving him towards the window on the far side of the house. Charles raised the window to its full height, climbed through it, and closed the window behind him just in time to see Mary Thorne welcome the arrival of Franklin Marchetti.

Outside was oppressive. It was as hot and dark as pitch. The heels of Charles’s boots slowly descended into the muddy bank of the slough, his socks soaking in the black water that come January would turn black ice. He peered through the window. The subsequent episode available by sight but not by sound, Charles would tell his second wife in later years, reminded him of the rarity shows that cost a penny at the Rankin County Fair. We can see it even now. Franklin stumbled slapdash about the shotgun house—so named because a shotgun can be fired from one end to the other without hitting a wall—in the arrogant, resentful manner of a third-son drunkard. He looked under the four-poster canopy bed with a torn mosquito net. He peered behind the oriental dressing screen catawampus to the corner. All the while, Mary Thorne followed him around the room, attempting to assuage whatever had him in arms. She patted his shoulders. She rubbed his elbows. At last, after looking askance into the rafters, after opening all the cabinets, after staring blank at the empty closet, Franklin grew calm. Mary Thorne took his face in her hands and put her wet lips full on his mouth. They held each other. They pressed their foreheads together. They spoke to each other. Mary Thorne did not notice Franklin notice the two drinks on the table. His hands formed a daisy chain around her throat, the petals of his thumbs interlaced with the stems of his fingers. Who knew such strength lay dormant in wrists that could only wear watches built extra-small by a specialty jeweler in St. Louis? The only reaction Franklin gave after what he had done, body of a woman limp on the floor, mark of her nails red on his face, was the dark spot that crept down the leg of his trousers. A puddle rose at his feet, drip by drip.

At the window, Charles fell straight to his knees, shut his eyes, set his jaw, and was overcome with conniption. We do not pity him. His wife was the last thing on his mind, but she should have been the first. Across the county, some twenty miles and four hours away, Julia Dodds put her children to bed and laid wait for her husband. She busied herself with work. On the potbelly stove bought from a corrupt railroad operator boiled an herbal stew, part witch hazel, part alum, part dandelion root, used by midwives to ease the pain of childbirth. Julia beat the substance until it was black as India ink. Everywhere along the floor, most particular beneath the ladder-back chairs of the dinner table, sat a mess of cedar leaves and shagbark. Julia swept hither and yon with a corn broom. She was emptying the cuspidor and checking the chamber pot when she heard someone stomp across the rickety boards of the porch and rap at the pinewood door of her home.

“What you knocking for, Charlie?” There was no answer. “Don’t be playing no games with me.”

“I’m looking for the missus of the wicker maker.” The voice was a man’s voice, but it was not Charlie’s voice. “Are you the missus of the wicker maker?”

Although she did not know his name at the time, Julia opened the door to the indistinct sight of Noah Johnson. He stepped closer. The skin of his face was as gauzy, brown, and mottled as a used tea bag. His wasted frame hung loose in his clothes. The structure of one of his eyes reminded Julia of ripples from a rock thrown in a stagnant pond. Even with celluloid in his collar and a tilt bowler on his head, basic elements of Southern gentility, this 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 to help in raising their youngest brother. They undertook the difficult task, year after year, of masculinizing his childhood. In autumn, they taught him how to sit on cardboard stolen from storerooms and sled down hillsides covered in pine straw. In spring, they let him hold a cane pole, fasten the nightcrawler, and bob for brim at a nearby swimming hole. The main education Robert received from his sisters, all things aside, was how to manipulate the women in his life. What could keep a boy as sharp, as quick, as shrewd from learning the most valuable, the most elusive lesson of manhood?

Shortly after Robert’s fifth birthday, Julia and her family of four were evicted from their second home for nonpayment of taxes, due once again to the bureaucratic intervention of the three Marchetti brothers. This time she had no choice in the matter. Julia knew she could not afford to forebear the upbring of her children all on her own. In a letter dated June 24, 1916, found decades later hidden next to a bottle in a rolltop desk at a country yard sale, Julia Dodds wrote to Charles Spencer, “I can no longer make right to raise your two daughters and your son. You have a son. His name is Robert. I do not ask for you to accept me to your home. A labor camp in the Delta, where I can put to use the two things that when idle do the devil’s work, will keep me for the season. I ask you to provide for Carrie, who is now eight, Bessie, who is now twelve, and Robert, who is now five. Robert already takes after you.” At the end of this letter, one of the most prized in our collection, Julia’s signature appears extravagantly wrought, loops round and curves smooth, its dark ink accentuated by what seems the mark of raindrops.

Julia put her children in the back of a tin lizzie on a hot, bright day in the middle of August and saw them for what she thought was the last time through a haze of dust, exhaust, and gnats. Along the way to Memphis, they subsisted on boiled peanuts and pickled peaches from roadside stands, played “Spot the Tree Bear” to pass the time, hummed “Farmer in the Dale” to forget the heat, and waved at the other automobiles that became more diverse every mile farther north. The children reached their destination by noon the next day. They set their ashen knuckles to the door and became a part of the Spencer household one at a time, each met by the man two of them had not seen in almost six years. Robert was last.

The true identity of Robert’s father, Charles would claim until he died of a heart attack at age fifty-four, was forever the neighbor of suspicion, doubt, and ignorance. On the day he first opened the door and looked on Robert’s bad eye, its lens opaque at center, its lid slouchy in contour, Charles surely must have known Noah Johnson had never been kicked by a mule. A whistle blew soft in the distance. A cloud brought shadow to the lawn. Charles said nothing to the boy, had an itch at his wrist, and let the door allow for entry.