Ace Atkins: Dirty South

A book in the Nick Travers Mystery series, 2004

I SPED ALONG HIGHWAY 61, darting from one small town in the Mississippi Delta to the next with nothing but my old army duffel bag and CDs of blues singers I spent my life researching. Two weeks on the road from New Orleans and still nothing to show for it. I drove back to Clarksdale on a spring afternoon where heat broke in gassy waves from the pavement to find my old buddy JoJo. He was waiting for me when I arrived, a sack lunch filled with cold fried chicken sandwiches and potato salad. Loretta waved to us from the porch of their old farmhouse. Large and brown, she squinted into the white-hot sun, knowing I had to get back to New Orleans by Friday and that only JoJo could help me.

“This man doesn’t like white people,” JoJo said, unwrapping our sandwiches and rolling down the side window to my 1970 Bronco. He was a black man in his late sixties, white hair, short mustache. Wisdom around the eyes.

“No, sir.”

“You think bringin’ along a black man will help?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You think ’cause he know me from the day might help, too.”

“Yes, sir.”

“He’s eighty years old,” JoJo said. “He may think I’m Jesus or Harvey the goddamn rabbit.”

“There is a possibility of that,” I said.

Hot breeze. Black birds cawed and screamed at stop signs at crossroads hanging in the pine and oak. Mimosa trees surrounded barns faded to a dull red and trailers lay on piles of concrete blocks. Gas stations out of the 1930s turned to Quickie Marts with long humming coolers filled with frozen candy bars and Cokes. Soft white bread. Stale peanuts.

“He was a good guitar player,” JoJo said. “Sonny Boy liked him. Sonny Boy said he made him sound real fine.”

“How long has he been in Marks?”

“Bronco says he heard he’d been in Marks since ’72.”

“What’s he do?”

“Carve the faces of dead people.”

We rolled along Highway 6 talking about old times at the bar JoJo used to own in New Orleans. It was a beautiful little place before it burned. A little cove on Conti Street with brick walls and a long mahogany bar dented and scarred from elbows and cold Dixie bottles. Loretta sang there every Friday and Saturday. During the week, she cooked. She made soul jambalaya and a mean batch of gumbo. JoJo and Loretta took care of me then. They were still my family.

We passed over a small metal bridge running over a creek and by a junkyard filled with hundreds of rusting cars. The creek had flooded into the ditch where the cars sat in stagnant water, reaching over their hoods and suffocating them in the green muck.

We talked about Robert Johnson and Lee Marvin. Bessie Smith and Earl Long.

JoJo told me about his corn crop coming up and a new John Deere tractor he bought and how he did not miss the bar he’d run for as long as I’d been alive.

“It’s still there.”

“Fuck it,” he said.

We rolled into Marks at sundown. A broken-down collection of gas stations and abandoned buildings stood around an old church and a graveyard. I had to slow down to miss a couple of wandering dogs, skinny and coated in mange. I put on some Robert Johnson and I told JoJo about Johnson coming to a juke joint in Marks in the thirties. He played guitar for Son House and Willie Brown with his new skills he’d acquired from a man named Ike Zinnerman in Hazlehurst. Son House said Johnson had sold his soul to the devil to get those skills.

We found an old black man on his porch, eating purple-hulled peas and cornbread and listening to Z. Z. Hill. JoJo got out of the truck with me and we asked him about where we could find a man who called himself Tip-Top. JoJo said his real name was Bob and that he liked to carve dead people.

The man pointed down the hill where some dogs gathered to eat a rooster that had been killed. At the end of the road, the sun was a dropping orange orb that looked as if, if you kept following the road for a mile, you could touch it. Walk into its big burning fire.

“How’s Maggie?” JoJo asked as we headed up the hill.

“Good.”

“This one gonna last?”

“Maybe.”

I parked on a gravel road and walked with a couple dogs trailing me. JoJo walked by my side whistling a little Muddy Waters song. The porch had been screened in, the front door hanging loose by its hinges. Wood shavings littered the buckled floor. Two pinewood coffins. New and fresh smelling. The sound of a television inside. Canned TV laughter.

“What’s he watchin’?”

We heard the familiar Love Boat theme song.

“Always liked that woman who ran the cruise,” JoJo said.

“Julie McCoy.”

“Yeah, she looked like a nice lady.”

“She liked the cocaine,” I said.

JoJo nodded. He wasn’t thrilled about Julie’s coke problems.

The door opened after a knock. An old black man strapping himself into a pair of overalls eyed us. He fixed up the strap on his shoulder. His left eye twitched. “You the man lookin’ for me?”

“You Tip-Top?” JoJo asked.

He nodded.

“This man don’t want to do you no harm,” JoJo said. “Wants to know about you and Sonny Boy.”

Tip-Top looked at JoJo. “I know you,” he said.

“I know.” JoJo walked off the porch and began to play fetch with a few of the dogs. I asked the man if he would mind sitting on the porch and letting me record him for a project I was working on about Sonny Boy. I told him I was a professor at Tulane University and was working with the University of Mississippi about the great harp player.

“Sonny Boy was a motherfucker who stole my whiskey and my women and once took a piss in my boot. I spent half my life tryin’ to forget about the Goat. Now you leave me be. Got work to do.”

He slammed his door and I heard the canned laughter of Love Boat .

JoJo kept playing with the dogs. He kept his eyes on one in particular, rubbing the dog’s head. She was of questionable breeding, somewhere a German shepherd in the mix, with long drooping ears and a curved tail.

“Look at her,” he said. “She ain’t no more than a pup. Smart. Look at her watchin’ me.”

JoJo walked back to the truck and grabbed some chicken from the sandwich he hadn’t finished. He fed the dog. “I don’t like people who don’t take care of their dogs. Show they’re evil. I know you tryin’ to find this man ’cause he got some stories about Sonny Boy. But he evil if he let a fine dog like this get all skin and bones.”

I heard a screen door slam behind the old shotgun house. I followed a dusty trail behind it and saw Tip-Top working a planer on top of a casket. A life-size dummy – some kind of stuffed black suit with a face made out of wood – watched from a lounge chair nearby.

I walked over to Tip-Top, moving my hand to the back of the dummy’s head. I wanted to do Señor Wences or even the Parkay margarine ad. “Friend of Charlie McCarthy?”