Delta Blues Read online

  Delta

  Blues

  EDITED BY

  Carolyn Haines

  a division of F+W Media, Inc.

  For David Thompson

  and McKenna Jordan,

  whose love of books and mysteries

  has touched the lives of writers

  all over the world

  Acknowledgments

  This is my first effort at editing an anthology, and it’s been both rewarding and surprising. First, I want to thank the most generous contributors to this collection. These authors wedged time to “do a story” into an already over-loaded schedule, and they did it with ultimate professionalism. Every time a story came in, I had the delight of reading something wonderful and fresh about a musical form and a place that I love. I met characters who are unforgettable, and I took journeys that are forever now a part of who I am.

  Bill and Francine Luckett, the Luckett Tyner Law Firm staff, the management of Ground Zero Blues Club, and Morgan Freeman are also owed a huge debt of thanks. “Above and beyond” is the only way to describe their help with this book.

  Tyrus Books is a rare gem in the realm of publishing. Benjamin LeRoy and Alison Janssen, the publishers, are an amazing duo. It’s been an honor to work with them.

  As always, my agent Marian Young has been a source of support and encouragement. She’s patiently listened to me sing the blues for years—thank goodness I now have something to show for it.

  And special thanks go to the booksellers and readers who make this kind of collection possible.

  Foreword

  Delta soil is deep and rich. Down here things grow. When the alluvial soil washes over the land by the Mississippi River, cotton, corn, and soybeans take root and jump up. You see, as the water runs slow the heavy particles settle, and only the finest elements are deposited along the banks at the mouth of the river. This loam contains not just minerals, but the blood, sweat and pain of countless souls. While a few acquired great wealth, many broke their backs for little pay, or none at all.

  And because of that, other things grow here too. The seed of imagination spouts powerful story tellers who, like their griot forebearers, use both words and music to create tales rooted in the old traditions, yet completely their own. Stories of lust, betrayal, loss, bad choices, revenge, heartache and heartbreak, but also grand hyperbole and dark humor. In this land a unique American form of music was born, a rootstock strong enough to spawn many derivatives. The Mississippi Delta is ground zero of the blues, meaning it was here where it all began.

  This collection of short fiction captures both the art of the tale and the power of the blues, and is a nod at the human condition that often inspires musicians to write and sing the blues. These stories tell about bad men and bad women who sometimes do good—or sometimes follow their true nature. Some of these characters know all about the dangers of making a bargain with the devil. And some know the power of redemption. These are characters who would not be out of place in a Honeyboy Edwards tune, and would be right at home alongside the desolate wail of Clarksdale, Mississippi, native Son House—

  Looked like 10,000 were standin’ ‘round the buryin’ ground

  You know I didn’t know 1 loved her til they damn laid her down

  Lord, have mercy on my wicked soul

  I wouldn’t mistreat you baby, for my weight in gold.

  In the preface of his book The Land Where the Blues Began, Alan Lomax notes that “the blues has always been a state of being as well as a way of singing.” He goes on to quote Leadbelly as saying, “When you lie down at night, turning from side to side, and you can’t be satisfied no way you do, Old Man Blues got you.” And as Leadbelly himself knew all too well, those dark moments can lead to very dark thoughts, and even darker acts. As Howlin’ Wolf said of that same feeling, “That’s evil. Evil is goin’ on.”

  This music is the rootstock for all forms of American music from jazz to rock, not to mention the gritty (and often violent) narrative tradition it shares with the best of contemporary rap. Off this hardy, adapting Delta vine grew Chuck Berry, Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. This land, which has seen so much wealth and so much poverty, is where it all began, in the heat and humidity of the Mississippi Delta cotton fields.

  The story told by the blues is one of loss and suffering, bad luck and trouble, and joy and excitement as well. My grandmother kept me out of the juke joints during my youth calling them “buckets of blood.” Hard times, yes. But also hard rhythms, hard liquor, and “doin’ the mess-around.” Howlin’ Wolf sang about fire, death, crime, and of course evil, but he also said, “We gonna pitch a wang dang doodle all night long.” That’s the blues. Those same elements, both contradictory and complementary, illustrate many of the stories in this volume.

  Like the blues, these tales move and shift over the character of human nature. They combine an element of crime or noir with the world of the blues. A partnership that is easy to understand. Both are messy, and they both tell about pain.

  The South, and Mississippi in particular, has a long tradition of nurturing talented writers. But a writer doesn’t have to be born or live in the Pine Barrens or the Delta to feel this particular love of character and story. Writers, just like blues players—and blues lovers—come from all over the world. These stories, written by some of the finest authors working today, exemplify a natural talent for crafting a tale. Whether these are native born or adopted Southerners, each person in this collection shares a love of story that would make William Faulkner, Eudora Welty or Tennessee Williams proud. So lay your burden down a spell, have yourself a cool drink and hitch a ride down that dark and lonesome highway with these masters of the literary craft, and watch as their characters, their tales, and their take on the blues come to life.

  —MORGAN FREEMAN

  Preface

  I’ve been a lot of things in my life, but one thing I’d never anticipated was being the editor of an anthology. As most good blues players will tell you, sometimes fate steps across a person’s path, and there’s no point fighting destiny.

  I experienced the Mississippi Delta and the blues at roughly the same time. My first lengthy visit to the Delta involved a photojournalist assignment in the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. If there’s any place where the blues linger, it’s certainly there. Once I had a taste of that flat, rich land that comprises the Delta and the music of the jukes that made me want to dance with abandon and wish for a voice where I could wail out my woes and joy, I had to go back. Again and again. Like my home state of Mississippi, the blues and the soil that birthed them crept into my blood.

  I met Benjamin LeRoy, now publisher of Tyrus Books, at a writers’ conference in Ft. Walton Beach, Florida, where we were both speakers. I had been impressed with the anthology Chicago Blues that Bleak House had published. He proposed the Delta Blues collection to me and asked me to edit it. By this time I had an inkling of who Ben was and the reputation that Bleak House was rapidly building in the world of literary crime fiction. Of course, I said yes. (And I said it so fast I didn’t even stretch the word into two syllables.)

  And here, a little over another year later, is the effort of our labor—a collection that contains stories by some of the finest writers working today. While you can plainly see the abilities of these writers as you read the stories, I want to also mention their generosity. Writing short fiction is some of the hardest work around, and many of these contributors took time out from writing novels to do a story for Delta Blues. Their take on crime and the blues fills a wide road, but each twist and turn is executed with skill.

  John Grisham takes us down to Parchman where we travel with a family cut from the whole cloth of bad decisions as they make a visit to that infamous prison farm, a place they are far to
o familiar with.

  Sometimes music can lift a man out of the worst of circumstances, if only momentarily. Sometimes that isn’t enough. Sometimes the price is much higher, as James Lee Burke tells us in his masterful tale.

  Charlaine Harris gives us her unique vision of a bargain with the dark side—a world that comes to life when the moon is high and also in dimly lit bars.

  Nathan Singer, Les Standiford and Daniel Martine also explore supernatural forces, which are a vital element in the history and mythology of the blues. Legend is a powerful force at work in our lives, and these writers dig in and take a hefty bite.

  David Sheffield offers us a very different take on the death of the legendary bluesman who met the Devil at the crossroads and made a bargain that left him dead at twenty-seven.

  Dean James, Michael Lister, Suzann Ellingsworth and I have stories centered by women who take the necessary action—for survival, or maybe for revenge. Toni L. P. Kelner, Ace Atkins and Mary Saums give us a more traditional detective/lawman as protagonist, but these stories pack a special twist, while Suzanne Hudson takes us on a trip to Memphis with a young female blues singer … and a murderess … or maybe not.

  Bill Fitzhugh uses the blues as the basis for deception in a tale about human greed. And Alice Jackson finds political intrigue woven with murder and the blues.

  Lynne Barrett’s story is a blues lament, an exploration of a murdered woman from two different points of view, one black and one white, one who loved her and one who loved her murderer.

  Writing as a team, Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly give us a strange and brutal story about a single act that leads to redemption.

  The collection is diverse, and that is part of the joy. Short stories are meant to be read at a sitting, but I’ll lay odds that one story won’t be enough. So make time to read several when you pick up this volume.

  —CAROLYN HAINES

  Contents

  Suzanne Hudson All the Way to Memphis

  David Sheffield Love in Vain

  Ace Atkins Nine Below Zero

  Alice Jackson Cuttin’ Heads

  Bill Fitzhugh Blind, Crippled, and Crazy

  James Lee Burke Big Midnight Special

  Dean James My Own Little Room in Hell

  Nathan Singer Dog Thunder Blues

  Suzann Ellingsworth Songbyrd Dead at 23

  Michael Lister Death at the Crossroads

  Lynne Barrett Blues for Veneece

  Charlaine Harris Crossroads Bargain

  Toni L.P. Kelner A Man Feeling Bad

  Daniel Martine Kidd Diamond

  Mary Saums Run Don’t Run

  Carolyn Haines The Sugar Cure

  Les Standiford Life and Casualty

  John Grisham Fetching Raymond

  Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly

  What His Hands Had Been Waiting For

  Florida Heatwave

  1 All the Way to Memphis

  Suzanne Hudson

  CLISTA JUNIPER WAS A METICULOUS WOMAN, from her immaculate housekeeping to her perfectly enunciated sentences to the way she presided over the Tender County High School library in southern Mississippi. It even extended to her daily wardrobe, which consisted of tailored suits in every shade of beige—so that the coral lips and nails, her trademark, would stand out all the more—her platinum-dyed hair double-French twisted in a tight, inwardly curling labial sheen, a la Tippi Hedren. Indeed, her colleagues—for she had no real intimates—often teased her about her early sixties look, whereupon Clista might express her practiced, breathy giggle and respond, “It is me, the look. Always has been.”

  “Right down to the girdle?” a teacher might ask.

  “Absolutely.”

  “With the clips and all?” another might chime in.

  “Certainly.”

  “They still make those?”

  “I have always believed in stocking up.”

  “What’s a girdle?” a neophyte, a young woman poorly read who took no note of puns, might ask.

  So Clista, though she was senior staff at sixty-something, would leave it to another woman, a fifty-something, to explain, getting back to her shelves and her silence and her computerized Dewey decimal system (although she maintained a card catalogue as well), shushing students with a coral pucker against her coral-nailed index finger.

  The automobile she drove on this day, her champagne-colored Cadillac, was as meticulously kept as she, although, on this particular day, she was thinking of taking up a former bad habit and filling the car’s ash tray with coral-printed filters on the butts of fags she had smoked. She was on edge, shaky, the twists of her coif slightly wispy, like the frayed nerves she so tightly held inside the emotions she rarely let loose. She had let loose this morning, though, before performing her usual ablutions and applying her makeup, to step into the Cadillac and drive not to the high school, where she would be expected after the weekend, but north, to some indeterminate place, she knew not where.

  When she saw the figure in the distance, on the side of the highway, she knew immediately what she would do. And, even though Clista was nothing like the sort to pick up a hitchhiker, she would certainly make an exception on this day, as she put her life, her profession, her town behind her, making a sure-to-be futile attempt to run away. This was a day of making all kinds of breaks, the shattering of facades, the clattering of realities, a day to step out of character and try to locate her self, if there ever was such a thing. It made a crazy kind of ironic sense to pick up a hitcher, who, as she drew closer, looked more and more like a teenage girl, finally becoming one, sturdy but slight of frame, like a gymnast. Certainly not threatening, like the haggard and tattooed serial killer stereotype that had forever lived in her wagons-circled mind. She pulled to the shoulder of the road and watched in the rearview mirror as the girl gathered up her things and bounded toward the waiting vehicle, then, catching her own eyes in the reflecting oval of silvered glass, saw a shadow of the emotion and primal fear that had captured her in the pre-dawn hours this morning, when she shot and killed her husband of forty-something years.

  It was only an oddity to her now that she had done such a thing; it seemed distant and sketchily surreal. Strange how rapidly those tautly-bound emotions came undone, ramping into the kind of sight-blotted rage that would allow a person to do murder, settling afterwards into a numbness of spirit and mind that allowed her to believe in the possibility of, simply, running away—to almost believe it never happened in the first place. The numbness vibrated in an ear-humming buzz, as if her entire skull were swaddled in layer upon layer of cotton sheeting, but there were fuzzy sounds of car doors and heavy canvas bags thudding into the leather seats. Then a voice, a face, something like words.

  “What?” Clista managed.

  “It’s just that you’ve saved my life, that’s all. If I had to be in this nothing place just one more day, just one more day, I would go nut case. See, my family is an insane asylum. My dope fiend mother especially. And so I just now packed up my shit, marched my butt down that dirt lane, and sat myself on the side of the highway. And here you come right off the bat. Shit, what’s your name?”

  It was a jarring question, and inside of Clista’s hesitation, her guest continued.

  “I’m Savannah. But I don’t think I’ll keep that name. It’s just not the blues. Savannah. It’s a city in Georgia, not a bluesy person. Oh, what about Georgia? For a name, I mean. Do you have any chips or something? I’m always hungry. I’m definitely set on a different speed than most other people. Are you going to put it in drive?”

  Again the out-of-left-field questions caught Clista off guard. “I—yes,” she said, pulling back onto the pavement. Ever prepared for emergencies, she gestured at the glove box, where Savannah found a pack of cheese crackers.

  The girl tore into the package with her teeth, orange crumbs scattering, then, “I love states for names—Bama, Carolina. Cities, not so much. Missouri is nice. What’s yours?”

  “My—”


  “Name.”

  “It’s Clista,” she said, thinking, and I murdered my husband this morning, because he did the unimaginable and betrayed our decades of sameness and safety and “understoods,” and “inasmuchases” and such immaculate respectability as most couples never achieve. He took all that was invested in our public presentation as a couple and crumbled every iota of trust into talcum powder and the fairy dust that magically transformed me into a cold, cold killer.

  “—so of course you know that,” Savannah was saying.

  “Know what?”

  “What I was saying. Are you alright? I was saying how your name sounds something like a female part, but I guess you caught a lot of teasing at a certain age, so of course you know that. Junior high is hell for everybody.” She sucked in a breath. “I’m sorry if I offended you. Sometimes I go over the top. My mind goes faster than I can talk and I try to keep up and so words get blurted out before I know it. You know?”

  Clista was not accustomed to such talk, talk of female parts with sexual references, cursing, and just plain chattiness of a distasteful bent, as she had no good best girlfriend, having kept the world at a polite, respectable distance. This girl, however, felt un-threatening in spite of her verbiage. “How old are you?” the driver attempted to divert.

  “Twenty-six,” was the reply. “I know, I know. I look sixteen. I get it all the time. It’s because I’m so small-boned. And flat-chested. I’ve thought about store-bought tits, implants, but I just don’t believe in doing that shit to your body.” She sighed with a flourish. “It’s a blessing and a curse, being my size. I mean, when I tell people I’m a blues singer, they laugh. ‘Ain’t no big, bluesy voice gonna come out of that little thing.’ Plus I’m white, obviously. ‘Little bitty white chicks can’t sing the blues.’ Folks just don’t take me seriously. But when you’ve lived through the low-down dirty shit I’ve lived through, you can damn sure feel the hurt. Like, what do you do when it takes your crack-head mother two years to get rid of a man who’s pushing his hands in your panties and you’re nine years old? Two years!”