There’s nothing quite like the cold black wind of the Mississippi night. It’s colder now, exacerbated by the steel freight containers tumbling and moaning like saudade giants, unsure of the direction they should be travelling to finally find their home. They're not shiny like they used to be and zinc painting cracks and blisters from their vast steel hulls. Sweet dust opaques the hue, like a lingering kiss that trapped them forever, born to rumble and born to roll. The thin, sepia rusted rails, perched inches above the gravel pits give them a lateral point of direction, all they gotta do is want to move. The eerie clangs of the yard echo along the coil with more humanity than their human counterparts. Clanging while they contract from the freeze, breathing using the weather as a metronome.
The darkness only breaking when two small yellow eyes come rolling slowly along the track.
Robert drops his head, and blows the warm breath from his lungs into the cold palms of his hands. The only gloves he has have the fingers cut off, and it makes the tips of his black hands turn almost white, like dead meat. He is reclining against the metal fence, finishing the last dregs from a flask of moonshine and smoking rolled tobacco. The tobacco leaves fill his mouth with every draw, and its bitterness stains his lips. The approaching freight train slows down and the draft helps pull him to his feet. Waiting for the empty carriage, Robert clutches the side of the door and drags himself into the darkness of the metal shell. He slides onto the floor and hangs his legs out the door. Skimming the cigarette from his hands with a classic flick, he draws a corner store harmonica from his jacket breast pocket and pushes more warm breath over the reeds. The sound is like a merry go round melody, without the hope and happiness. Rob has been riding these grainy rails for so long now.
“Hounds of hell on my tail, oh these hounds of hell” he mumbles, half drunk and half too cold to care. In between the breaks of the tune, Rob drawls the blues about anything. Dead Shrimp Blues, Honeymoon Blues, the Robert Johnson blues.
The years have passed slowly, with sluggish progression, and nothing to accent the days that pass. Robert made milk money with remedial errands and fence painting type effort. With no burden of place and people, Robert was as free as a Lynyrd Skynyrd song, rolling with the ease of a moss-less stone, moving with the perpetual shift that would not be caught or trapped. The people he met were fleeting and the towns he passed through were kept beautiful by the short memories he clung too. Not much need be said about his family life, because not much is known. And families can lead astray the honesty of individual doctrine, untarnished by the beliefs and influence of people you were probably ill-fatedly blossomed upon to begin with . . . But now, his feet and legs dangle in the pull of gravity, singing the saddest blues a mother could hear, and that’s all that mattered.
He sits against the bales of silk and remembers that Robert Johnson wasn’t always his name. He was Robert Spencer, after his mother’s second husband, old men called him “Little Robert Dusty”. He has another name now, stained in signature on the marriage certificate to a dead girl.
Robert, his Christian name, and Johnson, his lost and forgotten birth father. His 16-year-old bride, Virginia Travis, had died giving birth to his child. History, the bitch she is, repeats itself, leaving men without a woman to beat and sons without a father to hold. It was the last indigo days of March 1929, and at 17, Robert is a father, a widow and a musician. All things co-existing side by side, but more importantly, a consequence of each other.
He scratches at his nose, swinging the circle guitar from his back to the side of his legs. Making space to try and get some sleep, something that only seems to come now when he can still be moving without standing up. Always moving, always trying to escape these hounds of hell, the devil keeping up; to walk side by side, hand in hand, with a rambling man.
“I got to keep movinnnn', I got to keep movinnnn',
Blues fallin' down like hail, blues fallin' down like hail,
Mmmmm-mm-mm-mm, blues fallin' down like hail, blues fallin' down like hail,
And the day keeps on worring' me, there's a hell-hound on my trail,
Hell-hound on my trail, hell-hound on my trail.”
The silk behind his back is soft, made hard by the canvas bag it’s stored in. Robert takes off his pork pie hat and crams himself into a nook between bags. The train rumbles along the lines with great persistence, as if being chased by a pack of hungry dogs, rabid with the fury of their prey escaping. Rocking with the sway of the freight, and from cracked brown lips; drew words with fumble and remorse. He closed his eyes, his evil eyes as they were called, milk washed with a cataract. The warm insides of his eyelids wetting his wind burned iris, and within minutes and a few hard pulls of bourbon, Robert fell asleep like a burr in the silk fields.
The dream came quickly, like a feline pounce. Awaking in his mind with music you can only hear in dreams, playing him across a field of silver and snow. Crimson satin robes flutter without pattern, blanketing any thing after the horizon line. Robert stands with his back turned to a small crowd of black folk on fold out chairs. One lady has a hair net on and is knitting what looks to be the sleeve of a cardigan. No one is speaking, just quietly looking forward with silent anticipation for the unknown shadow on stage to begin moving; to entertain them. Let them forget or help them to remember, depending on which side of the grass they stood. The music still plays with that melancholy nonchalance that struggles to steal your attention, but easily fuzzes everything else.
And while dream story Robert runs a hand down the frets of the guitar in his hand the crowd slowly raises their blank and bored faces. But the guitar is bleeding, chunks of meat and murder squealing, crying in long wet sobs of a dying child. Every strum setting free the tortured screams that only lost children might make. There is no commotion in the crowd and they simply stand to leave. It's something they have seen and will see again, not disgusted; just too tired for broken hearts or someone-done-some-body-wrong songs.
With the five or six empty seats, shadowing the lawn, the black shadows vanish and Robert falls to his knees.
"I went down to the crossroads and fell down on my knees, asked the Lord up above for mercy, save poor Bob if you please."
In the temporal way dreams only can, Robert awakens, with a gentle shrug from the train pulling into a slow and easy stop. Settling in the dusty shadow of the breaking morning. This is the last stop while rails are changed and trains destinations determined. The junction, the scotch corner, the crossroads.
With the lethargic arms of a man without a home, he pulls himself from the cotton sashays, collecting his things and jumps from the carriage. God, these rails had been good to him and he knew the drill. Always off at the crossroads and wait while the driver changed the tracks and the guards walked down the lines with his coffee and cigarette. Just wait in the shrubs, wait for him to pretend he’s done his job. God knows if he could, the guard would turn to Robert and give him a wink. Smile at him and tip the top of his mug towards the black man, sitting in the dirt with a dime store harmonica, say something like “hell of a mornin’ we got here aint it boy.” Or “come on up here, boy, we got fresh joe inside.” But this was lucid; we are all covered with too much hate, too much anxiety to ever wish people a better day than their own. The checks usually took at least 20 to 30 minutes, and this morning the cold was particularly bitter.
From the squinted slits that where his eyes and the milky haze from his cataract, the neon lights of an all-night truck stop glow orange on the floor. Probing his pocket with them stiff fingers that made guitar strumming hard, Robert found a few small silver coins. It was going to be a while before he stopped again, he didn’t know how long or where, but it sure wasn’t here. Thinking about boss man's coffee had made his stomach sting with a thirst for warmth. Perhaps some hot chick pea soup or a warm slice of cinnamon pie, nothing overly fancy, but nutrience and sustenance, just enough to keep going, keep existing.
Keeping low and in the darkness of the shadows, he slithered through the main road and pressed his face lightly against the window of the store. No one inside but the chef and a pretty white woman reading a book, alone and uninterested. The scene was safe enough and that blood lust for something warm would have overridden doubt regardless. The door opened with little fuss and no one looked up, which made Robert feel like he was on vacation. With a slight spring in his step, Robert walked to the counter and peered up at the menu written on a black chalkboard with piss yellow chalk. He put his money on the counter to relax the chef. He’s played this game a million times, he knew the score. The chef turns and with a big round and meaty head, he looks Robert up and down. The chef’s small mouth opens and closes like a dying trout, piss holes for eyes, his lips crack and his voice is high pitched.
“What’s it you want, boy?”
Scratching the dimes across the bench with his finger he makes a pile with enough silver to pay for a cup of coffee.
“Just coffee.”
He didn’t really want coffee, he would rather have soup. But he was panicked and embarrassed, flushed with the man's eyes following his.
“Black?”
“That’s right”
The chef regards Robert, turns and takes slow and deliberate steps to a steaming jug of thick black coffee.
The lights of the café are warm and inviting. Different to the seemingly endless dark of the trains mingling with the rest of the night. It’s starting to rain and trickles of water run lines down the window like a champagne bottle. The rain never depressed Robert, it was almost comforting. Even more comforting than the sunshine. This coffee though, this god damn coffee, was going to be amazing.
“Thank you,” Robert mutters quietly, accepting the coffee and leaving behind the little money he had.
With all his shit stuck to his back, Robert wraps two cold hands around the mug and inhales the steam with his face hovering above the coffee. Not blowing to cool it down but breathing in to steal its heat. There are only a few seats along the window of the café, overlooking the crossroads.
Robert takes a throne close enough to the driver's cabin and watched the beads of wet slip across the glass, the sun still setting in the distance, heavy with a weighty day ahead of it. The lines around his mouth tightened while he sipped at the coffee, the heat burning his mouth and gums. There's nothing much to do now but wait and enjoy the warmth of indoors, so with his hands behind his head, Robert closes his eyes and daydreams.
For a few moments Robert enjoys the red glow of the rising sun through the curtains of his eye lids; that deep scarlet that’s more of a feeling than a colour.
“Excuse me sir, but do I know you?”
His eyelids raise and focus on a beautiful white woman who has seemed to mirage in the seat in front of him.
“Beg your pardon ma'am, I don’t know nobody, I’m just drinken my coffee and I'll be gone, don’t you go an . . .” Robert was fumbling on his words like a drunk in a prison cell, not afraid, more unconsciously obnoxious. “Well my my my, this isn’t the Robert I know, all a blush by a woman.” She speaks like marshmallows and drops her chin to narrow her eyes into his. She continues, “What’s happened to you? I’ve never seen a man so blue.”
It was funny really, this kind of strange interaction would have caused any man to cry, run, lose his mind; but Robert was calm and oblivious. She knew his name without reference, she read the way he felt and calmed him at the same time, his body was tranced and his mind was at ease. A silence across the table, just a weightless pressure on Robert's shoulders.
“I have a feelin’ you may have me mistaken, I never knew no white woman.” Looking her face over, he puts his hands on the table in front of him.
She laughs sweetly and puts her hands on top of Robert's; the feeling of her skin was rough and harsh, cold as ice.
“Oh the foolishness, Robert. Names and faces are irrelevant, you should know that. It’s like the time that’s broken down between morning and night, such a brief moment, so small but so infinite that it doesn’t exist. An ironic line of continual separation that connects everything; while at the same time turning it to nothing. You know who I am. You have felt me when your wife died; the same feeling you feel now. That one exemption in infinite possibility, I am the reflection that gives the viewer a chance to see."
With a slim tongue sticking from his mouth and running across the bottom of her lip, she leans forward.
“A drunk in this godless arcadia of wolf and sheep. The checkmate”
She squeezed his hand harshly and he felt a surge of electricity charge over his cold body.
“What can old Bob do for you miss?” hypnotised by the articulations of this woman and the slow sweet rolls of words water falling from her lips.
“Nothing, I have everything I could possibly need, I want for nothing. Maybe I could offer something to you?”
“I got nothing, what do I need?” the funny paradox that makes more sense than her stories, and Robert feels proud that he can manage words with such a beautiful renaissance.
“Stop . . . stop all this running madness. Take this money, in about six minutes a Greyhound bus will be arriving at the station. It will take you home. Make the music you love, and with time you will give birth to the bluest tones ever heard. You will be the grandfather of expression and melancholy. It will start with you and it will move to places you could never dream of, it will free and capture millions.” She spoke almost without moving her lips this time. As if she was sitting in Robert's ear.
“What you want from me?”
“Nothing you can hold or see. It will not be taken now and you won’t miss it as long as you live.”
Robert just stared into her eyes. Vicious eyes all pissed on with wetness, shining from the center of her face. There was a small envelope on the table with his name written on it, and a grey ticket stub beside it. It wasn’t really an option, not a decision or a choice; there was no reason not to.
“I tell you what lady,” Robert takes a slug at his coffee and collects his things at his side. “I'm going to go home and get drunk . . . whatever happens after that is no business of yours.”
“You have no idea how right you are Robert.” She purrs, and stands to leave, offering a cold hand to shake. He takes the hand into his and nonchalantly raises and drops his arm. Throwing his guitar on his back and putting his hand into his pockets, Robert gives the mystery lady his back and slowly walks towards the glass door and the lightly beating rain.
His chest beating with a heart, but his stomach empty of that warmth. And that’s the important part. Not the history, not fancy words about his past, but Robert Johnson giving away his ticket. And still taking the ride.
Early this mornin' when you knocked upon my door.
Early this mornin' when you knocked upon my door.
And I said Hello, Satan, I believe it's time to go.
Me and the Devil was walkin' side by side.
Me and the Devil, ooo, was walkin' side by side.
I'm goin' to beat my woman until I get satisfied.
She say you don't see why that I will dog her 'round.
(spoken: 'Now, baby, you know you ain't doin' me right, now.')
She say you don't see why, oo, that I will dog her 'round.
It must-a be that old evil spirit so deep down in the ground.
You may bury my body down by the highway side.
(spoken: 'Baby, I don't care where you bury my body when I'm dead and gone.')
You may bury my body, ooo, down by the highway side.
So my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride.
Renee Blaxland - 2008-06-10 02:12:08
Very good- I like this in particular "All things co-existing side by side, but more importantly, a consequence of each other."
Too true all too true.
D'Arne - 2008-06-17 00:32:08
Great work babe, you have a real talent for writing. This is more a story about his life and not a journal, but it doen't matter to me coz I think your perfect at what ever you write. Just one part i like.
Skimming the cigarette from his hands with a classic flick, he draws a corner store harmonica from his jacket breast pocket and pushes more warm breath over the reeds. The sound is like a merry go round melody, without the hope and happiness. Rob has been riding these grainy rails for so long now.
Don't forget I'm your biggest fan. lol
Love ya dee
ben - 2008-06-17 01:18:26
did this artical bomb?
or did no one ever really even give a fuck?
Anonymous - 2009-04-15 14:39:45
I love this article. Robert Johnson is an inspiration, and many artists admired him. He was one of the very first blues artists. :)