Song of Susannah

“Hile, Mia, Hile, Mother”

ONE

Ka might have put that downtown bus where it was when Mia’s cab pulled up, or it might only have been coincidence. Certainly it’s the sort of question that provokes argument from the humblest street-preacher (can you give me hallelujah) all the way up to the mightiest of theological philosophers (can you give me a Socratic amen). Some might consider it almost frivolous; the mighty issues that loom their shadows behind the question, however, are anything but.

One downtown bus, half empty.

But if it hadn’t been there on the corner of Lex and Sixty-first, Mia likely would never have noticed the man playing the guitar. And, had she not stopped to listen to the man playing the guitar, who knows how much of what followed might have been different?

TWO

“Awwww, man, wouldja looka-dat!” the cab driver exclaimed, and lifted his hand to his windshield in an exasperated gesture. A bus was parked on the corner of Lexington and Sixty-first, its diesel engine rumbling and its taillights flashing what Mia took to be some kind of distress code. The bus driver was standing by one of the rear wheels, looking at the dark cloud of diesel smoke pouring from the bus’s rear vent.

“Lady,” said the cab driver, “you mind getting off on the corner of Sixtieth? Tha’be all right?”

Is it? Mia asked. What should I say?

Sure, Susannah replied absently. Sixtieth’s fine.

Mia’s question had called her back from her version of the Dogan, where she’d been trying to get in touch with Eddie. She’d had no luck doing that, and was appalled at the state of the place. The cracks in the floor now ran deep, and one of the ceiling panels had crashed down, bringing the fluorescent lights and several long snarls of electrical cable with it. Some of the instrument panels had gone dark. Others were seeping tendrils of smoke. The needle on the Susannah-Mio dial was all the way over into the red. Below her feet, the floor was vibrating and the machinery was screaming. And saying that none of this was real, it was all only a visualization technique, kind of missed the whole point, didn’t it? She’d shut down a very powerful process, and her body was paying a price. The Voice of the Dogan had warned her that what she was doing was dangerous; that it wasn’t (in the words of a TV ad) nice to fool Mother Nature. Susannah had no idea which of her glands and organs were taking the biggest beating, but she knew that they were hers. Not Mia’s. It was time to call a halt to this madness before everything went sky-high.

First, though, she’d tried to get in touch with Eddie, yelling his name into the mike with north central positronics stamped on it again and again. Nothing. Yelling Roland’s name also brought no result. If they were dead, she would have known it. She was sure of that. But not to be able to get in touch with them at all… what did that mean?

It mean you once mo’ been fucked mos’ righteous, honey chile, Detta told her, and cackled. This what you get fo’ messin wit’ honkies.

I can get out here? Mia was asking, shy as a girl arriving at her first dance. Really?

Susannah would have slapped her own brow, had she had one. God, when it was about anything but her baby, the bitch was so goddam timid!

Yes, go ahead. It’s only a single block, and on the avenues, the blocks are short.

The driver… how much should I give the driver?

Give him a ten and let him keep the change. Here, hold it out for me-

Susannah sensed Mia’s reluctance and reacted with weary anger. This was not entirely without amusement.

Listen to me, sweetheart, I wash my hands of you. Okay? Give him any fucking bill you want.

No, no, it’s all right. Humble now. Frightened. I trust you, Susannah. And she held up the remaining bills from Mats, fanned out in front of her eyes like a hand of cards.

Susannah almost refused, but what was the point? She came forward, took control of the brown hands holding the money, selected a ten, and gave it to the driver. “Keep the change,” she said.

“Thanks, lady!”

Susannah opened the curbside door. A robot voice began to speak when she did, startling her-startling both of them. It was someone named Whoopi Goldberg, reminding her to take her bags. For Susannah-Mia, the question of her gunna was moot. There was only one piece of baggage which concerned them now, and of this Mia would soon be delivered.

She heard guitar music. At the same time she felt her control over the hand stuffing money back into her pocket and the leg swinging out of the cab begin to ebb. Mia, taking over again now that Susannah had solved another of her little New York dilemmas. Susannah began to struggle against this usurpation

(my body, goddammit, mine, at least from the waist up, and that includes the head and the brain inside it!)

and then quit. What was the use? Mia was stronger. Susannah had no idea why that should be, but she knew that it was.

A kind of queer Bushido fatalism had come over Susannah Dean by this point. It was the sort of calmness that cloaks the drivers of cars skidding helplessly toward bridge overpasses, the pilots of planes that heel over into their final dives, their engines dead… and gunslingers driven to their final cave or draw. Later she might fight, if fighting seemed either worthwhile or honorable. She would fight to save herself or the baby, but not Mia-this was her decision. Mia had forfeited any chance of rescue she might once have deserved, in Susannah’s eyes.

For now there was nothing to do, except maybe to turn the labor force dial back to 10. She thought she would be allowed that much control.

Before that, though… the music. The guitar. It was a song she knew, and knew well. She had sung a version of it to the folken the night of their arrival in Calla Bryn Sturgis.

After all she had been through since meeting Roland, hearing “Man of Constant Sorrow” on this New York street-corner did not strike her as coincidental in the least. And it was a wonderful song, wasn’t it? Perhaps the avatar of all the folk songs she had so loved as a younger woman, the ones that had seduced her, step by step, into activism and had led her finally to Oxford, Mississippi. Those days were gone-she felt ever so much older than she had then-but this song’s sad simplicity still appealed to her. The Dixie Pig was less than a block from here. Once Mia had transported them through its doors, Susannah would be in the Land of the Crimson King. She had no doubts or illusions about that. She did not expect to return from there, did not expect to see either her friends or her beloved again, and had an idea she might have to die with Mia’s cheated howls for company… but none of that had to interfere with her enjoyment of this song now. Was it her death-song? If so, fine.

Susannah, daughter of Dan, reckoned there could have been far worse.

THREE

The busker had set up shop in front of a cafe called Blackstrap Molasses. His guitar case was open in front of him, its purple velvet interior (exactly the same shade as the rug in sai King’s Bridgton bedroom, can you say amen) scattered with change and bills, just so any unusually innocent passersby would know the right thing to do. He was sitting on a sturdy wooden cube which looked exactly like the one upon which the Rev. Harrigan stood to preach.

There were signs that he was almost through for the night. He had put on his jacket, which bore a New York Yankees patch on the sleeve, and a hat with JOHN LENNON LIVES printed above the bill. There had apparently been a sign in front of him but now it was back in his instrument case, words-side down. Not that Mia would have known what was writ upon it in any case, not she.

He looked at her, smiled, and quit his fingerpicking. She raised one of the remaining bills and said, “I’ll give you this if you’ll play that song again. All of it, this time.”

The young man looked about twenty, and while there was nothing very handsome about him, with his pale, spotty complexion, the gold ring in one of his nostrils, and the cigarette jutting from the corner of his mouth, he had an engaging air. His eyes widened as he realized whose face was on the bit of currency she was holding. “Lady, for fifty bucks I’d play every Ralph Stanley song I know… and I know quite a few of em.”

“Just this one will do us fine,” Mia said, and tossed the bill. It fluttered into the busker’s guitar case. He watched its prankish descent with disbelief. “Hurry,” Mia said. Susannah was quiet, but Mia sensed her listening. “My time is short. Play.”

And so the guitar-player sitting on the box in front of the cafe began to play a song Susannah had first heard in The Hungry i, a song she had herself sung at God only knew how many hootenannies, a song she’d once sung behind a motel in Oxford, Mississippi. The night before they had all been thrown in jail, that had been. By then those three young voter-registration boys had been missing almost a month, gone into the black Mississippi earth somewhere in the general vicinity of Philadelphia (they were eventually found in the town of Longdale, can you give me hallelujah, can you please say amen). That fabled White Sledgehammer had begun once more to swing in the redneck toolies, but they had sung anyway. Odetta Holmes-Det, they called her in those days-had begun this particular song and then the rest of them joined in, the boys singing man and the girls singing maid. Now, rapt within the Dogan which had become her gulag, Susannah listened as this young man, unborn in those terrible old days, sang it again. The cofferdam of her memory broke wide open and it was Mia, unprepared for the violence of these recollections, who was lifted upon the wave.

FOUR

In the Land of Memory, the time is always Now.

In the Kingdom of Ago, the clocks tick… but their hands never move.