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Posts tagged ‘natchez trace’

Nov 10

22 Comments

You Never Even Call Me By My Name

I remember the first time I walked into Big Rosie’s place. The jukebox was playing Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn. Louisiana Woman Mississippi Man. I wanted to walk up to those flashing lights and educate Mr Twitty on what Louisiana women could do. Some of them, not all of them.

I wore black to my interview: black jeans, black cowboy shirt, black boots, black hat. Hell, even my underwear was black for the occasion. I remember stretching out my legs and crossing them at the ankles and thinking The Black Cowboy. What a goddamn joke.

That’s the first thing Big Rosie said to me, you know, like she read my mind or something. I mean, I was afraid the chair wouldn’t hold her when she sat and turned those black holes of eyes onto me.

“This ain’t no place for none of that Muskrat Ramble horse shit.” That’s what she said. I mean, no “hello” or “My name’s Rosie” or anything.

I downed a gulp of Jack Daniels – you know, trying to play the part – and smiled, remembering how many times I danced with my instrument. It was like it breathed, you know? Even played it a few times with that kid, that singing-piano-playing-prodigy who was the son of a New Orleans Important. Muskrat Ramble was the music of my life.

“Just give me a minute.” I said it into the microphone.

Big Rosie heaved herself to her feet. “Jesus-God. Spare me from another country singer who is tem-per-men-tal.” She waddled off behind the bar and poured herself a jam jar full of something clear and slugged it. I mean, slugged the whole damn thing.

I watched her to make sure she wasn’t going to, you know, spontaneously combust or something. And, I dug into the front pocket of my jeans. It was where I always carried it, a stained envelope that was split at the creases. It was her last letter, you know, over a year old, but I blinked my eyes and tried to focus on her cursive scrawl.

Dear Daddy My Dearest Daddy!

I write you every day. Life without you is no fun. Aunt Bertie tries to sing me to sleep when she’s not busy at my bedtime, but her voice isn’t pretty like yours. Sometimes, I sing with her and pretend my voice is yours, because it came from you, didn’t it? 

It doesn’t help. Nothing does. 

I hope you will come for me someday and take me away with you. I’d do almost anything to see you again!!!

I love you Daddy.

Emmaline Cagney

Well, I had to wipe my eyes, about the time Big Rosie’s voice boomed out of the back.

“Sing it. Sing. It. You take all that crybaby horse shit and channel it into a goddamn song in exactly three seconds, or I will personally pick up your skinny Black Cowboy cliched ass and throw it into the street out there.”

You know, she could do it, too.

Anyway, I stuffed Emmaline’s letter between the strings of my guitar, right there at the top, and I strummed a chord, and I sang. I mean, I don’t even remember what song it was, but when I finished, Big Rosie stood back there, her hands on whatever accounted for her waist, and I think she was smiling. It was always hard to tell with her, you know, but I think she was.

To read the first post in this series, click here. I hope you’ll see it again someday.

Oct 7

34 Comments

He Got It Up

A quick post with weak internet. We are at French Camp, Mississippi. In an ancient cabin. Too dark to see much outside.

The big lines from today:

(Note: Woman in bonnet in the Eisenhower photo in previous post is actually Miss Ethel. We found that out on the after-breakfast house tour at the B & B.)

Miss Ethel – “When in doubt, 1850.”

Miss Ethel – “I just don’t know what to think about people who don’t drink coffee.” (I don’t, either.)

Miss Ethel – “My cousin – who is INSANE – let that plantation go to ruin. He lived with goats and chickens. Bless his heart.”

Miss Ethel – “I opened this cabinet and found…….an entire set of Limoges!”

Miss Ethel – “My Yankee daughter lives in Richmond. She doesn’t like how much they talk about Robert E. Lee, and I told her she was never going to have any friends if she didn’t stop complaining about that.”

Miss Ethel – “We lived in Waterproof, Louisiana. I came home in fifth grade, and told my parents it was the best day of my life. My best friend was going to have a baby. We moved to Natchez the next week.”

******

MTM – “It’s no wonder all the great writers come from The South. In Wisconsin, where I grew up, nobody would even talk to you on one of these treks. Here, you get the whole family tree.”

******

I may get another novel out of this weekend. We shall see.

Apr 13

33 Comments

There’s Beer in my Tears

This Natchez Trace business has morphed into a series. It’s seen a million fathers, probably. This might be one of them. If this is your first visit to the blog, or if you’re catching up, please go back to this post and read forward to digest it whole.

Strumming the guitar and singing is what happens to me when I don’t know what else to do. Does it help me think?…..Nah. Probably not. Forget?………Never. Heal the aching hole in my insides that was left by my daughter?

Only she can occupy that place, that ragged chasm in my soul.

I show up at this dive, this nowhere bar at the end of the Trace, staring out at that ridiculous concrete Parthenon thing, five nights a week. Sit on my stool. Swig my no-count pissy draft beer. Pour out my soul to the fourteen people in this stinking, smoky excuse for an establishment.

How much I miss her tumbles out of the tips of my fingers, rolls off the end of my tongue into the reverberating mic, when all these losers want is picking and grinning. Sad can’t be happy without a heaping dose of irony.

The only thing that’s ironic about my sorry life is that I can’t see my daughter, my blonde haired, ringleted angel, way off down there in New Orleans. In two years, I’ve seen her twice. Once, walking down Bourbon Street in her starched pink dress and ribbons flowing every place. The other time, pounding on the window of the car, screaming for me as her bitch of a mother whisked her away from the courthouse. My little girl is eight now, and I can only imagine how she’s changing as she grows.

As she grows up without her Daddy who worships her.

I can’t write a stinking song that isn’t an ode to how much I miss her, a symphonic anthem of loneliness and despair. Why write something stupid like “There’s a tear in my beer” when my beer is more tears than booze? I’d walk all the way down the Trace in a continuous thunderstorm in the black of night to bring my daughter back to me.

Time for my next set. Maybe, if I sing with enough heart this time, my voice will ripple over that old Trace and penetrate my daughter’s innocent dreams.

Apr 12

41 Comments

Hitching a Ride to a Dream

This Natchez Trace business has morphed into a series. A lost girl brushes the Trace today. If this is your first visit to the blog, or if you’re catching up, please go back to this post and read forward to digest it whole.

Hitchhikin’ ain’t for sissies. Unless you’re a sissy like me, a stringy-haired hippie chick with a dream of actin’ in New York City. In Natchez, nobody cottoned to my dreams, my as-pir-a-tions. They tole me to settle down. To grow up. To do my duty to my momma and marry a good ole boy, pop out a coupla runts, visit Momma’s house every Sunday for lunch after church. Since the good ole boys worth marryin’ are being shot up in Viet Nam, and the good ole boys whose daddies bought ‘em out of that place are too rich for me, and the hippies I hang out with usually all just want to live in sin, it looks like I won’t be gettin’ married any time soon in Natchez.

And, here’s the other problem with Natchez. My momma lives there. Whores act. That’s what my momma said. My actin’ was like being a hussy. Teasin’ people into believin’ I’m somethin’ I ain’t. Gettin’ them to caress me with their lustful eyes and thoughts of sex.

Even when I played Holy Mary Mother of God in the nativity scene at church, she said this. The first time I said a cuss word in a part, she cried and had to go home and take a shower because my performance made her feel so filthy dirty.

I said the word ‘dang.’ A slang word, I know, but my momma thinks the slang words are just as wicked as the real thing, because the real thing is what everybody hears in their minds.

You understand why I had to get out of that place. Run away. I’m seventeen and everything.

I’m hitchin’ a ride up the Trace to Nashville. Walkin’ through a stinking cypress swamp. Trees risin’ out of their roots in black water. Spanish moss reflected on the still surface. Gators honkin’ a powerful angry background tune against the brush of the wind. This place. This Trace. It gets in your skin, gives you the guts to tread over it into anything.

Even to walk all the way to your dream.

Apr 11

46 Comments

I’m All Shook Up

This Natchez Trace business has morphed into a series. Today, a character you may recognize, hiding within one you may not. If this is your first visit to the blog, or if you’re catching up, please go back to this post and read forward to digest it whole.

Nashville sure feels like a far piece from Tupelo, Mississippi. Even for a guy like me. Bigger ‘n life. Idn’t that what they say about people like me? Whoever ‘they’ be.

My brother, he’s only eight these days. Stuck in a no-count town in the middle-of-noplace. Tupelo. He takes hisself to school. He runs around outside. Chews some. Dips some. Ma don’t know none of that stuff, or she’d whup him good. To ever body, he’s just a regular kid.

I know better. I kin see things they cain’t, wanderin’ around out here in the wilderness. Like them Israelites. Down hollers and up hills. Back and forth. This-a-way and that-a-way. I don’t never git no rest. Don’t need it, anyways, in the shape I’m in.

It idn’t just that I see what he’s a-doin’ now, though. I’m what they call privileged. I kin see what he’s a-gonna be, kin peek through peep hole of time. That’s what the green leaves and all this open air does to a feller; it makes him see things, even when he don’t want to. When all they’re doin’ is showin’ him who he coulda been if he hadn’t been dead when he was born.

My twin brother, he’s a-gonna be somebody someday. He’s a-gonna git out of that podunk town, that beautiful boy who carries that face. That voice.

My face. My voice.

‘Cept nobody’s around to see. Just me, whistlin’ through the trees in the breeze, partin’ the confounded humidity like a tease, spyin’ on my twin brother Elvis like a whisper on the Trace.

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