The music rose hoarse and wild:
I wonder where ma easy rider’s gone?
He done left me, put ma new gold watch in pawn.
It was Harriett’s voice in plaintive moan to the night sky. Jimboy had taught her that song, but a slight, clay-colored brown boy who had hopped bells at the Clinton Hotel for a couple of months, on his way from Houston to Omaha, discovered its meaning to her. Puppy-love, maybe, but it had hurt when he went away, saying nothing. And the guitar in Jimboy’s hands echoed that old pain with an even greater throb than the original ache itself possessed.
Approaching footsteps came from the front yard.
“Lord, I can hear you-all two blocks away!” said Annjee, coming around the house, home from work, with a bundle of food under her left arm. “Hello! How are you, daddy? Hello, ma! Gimme a kiss Sandy. … Lord, I’m hot and tired and most played out. This late just getting from work! … Here, Jimboy, come on in and eat some of these nice things the white folks had for supper.” She stepped across her husband’s outstretched legs into the kitchen. “I brought a mighty good piece of cold ham for you, hon’, from Mis’ Rice’s.”
“All right, sure, I’ll be there in a minute,” the man said, but he went on playing “Easy Rider,” and Harriett went on singing, while the food was forgotten on the table until long after Annjee had come outdoors again and sat down in the cool, tired of waiting for Jimboy to come in to her.
Off and on for nine years, ever since he had married Annjee, Jimboy and Harriett had been singing together in the evenings. When they started, Harriett was a little girl with braided hair, and each time that her roving brother-in-law stopped in Stanton, he would amuse himself by teaching her the old Southern songs, the popular ragtime ditties, and the hundreds of varying verses of the blues that he would pick up in the big dirty cities of the South. The child, with her strong sweet voice (colored folks called it alto) and her racial sense of rhythm, soon learned to sing the songs as well as Jimboy. He taught her the parse me la, too, and a few other movements peculiar to Southern Negro dancing, and sometimes together they went through the buck and wing and a few taps. It was all great fun, and innocent fun except when one stopped to think, as white folks did, that some of the blues lines had, not only double, but triple meanings, and some of the dance steps required very definite movements of the hips. But neither Harriett nor Jimboy soiled their minds by thinking. It was music, good exercise—and they loved it.
“Do you know this one, Annjee?” asked Jimboy, calling his wife’s name out of sudden politeness because he had forgotten to eat her food, had hardly looked at her, in fact, since she came home. Now he glanced towards her in the darkness where she sat plump on a kitchen-chair in the yard, apart from the others, with her back to the growing corn in the garden. Softly he ran his fingers, light as a breeze, over his guitar strings, imitating the wind rustling through the long leaves of the corn. A rectangle of light from the kitchen-door fell into the yard striking sidewise across the healthy orange-yellow of his skin above the unbuttoned neck of his blue laborer’s shirt.
“Come on, sing it with us, Annjee,” he said.
“I don’t know it,” Annjee replied, with a lump in her throat, and her eyes on the silhouette of his long, muscular, animal-hard body. She loved Jimboy too much, that’s what was the matter with her! She knew there was nothing between him and her young sister except the love of music, yet he might have dropped the guitar and left Harriett in the yard for a little while to come eat the nice cold slice of ham she had brought him. She hadn’t seen him all day long. When she went to work this morning, he was still in bed—and now the blues claimed him.
In the starry blackness the singing notes of the guitar became a plaintive hum, like a breeze in a grove of palmettos; became a low moan, like the wind in a forest of live-oaks strung with long strands of hanging moss. The voice of Annjee’s golden, handsome husband on the doorstep rang high and far away, lonely-like, crying with only the guitar, not his wife, to understand; crying grotesquely, crying absurdly in the summer night:
I got a mule to ride.
I got a mule to ride.
Down in the South somewhere
I got a mule to ride.
Then asking the question as an anxious, left-lonesome girl-sweetheart would ask it:
You say you goin’ North.
You say you goin’ North.
How ’bout yo’ … lovin’ gal?
You say you goin’ North.
Then sighing in rhythmical despair:
O, don’t you leave me here.
Babe, don’t you leave me here.
Dog-gone yo’ comin’ back!
Said don’t you leave me here.
On and on the song complained, man-verses and woman-verses, to the evening air in stanzas that Jimboy had heard in the pinewoods of Arkansas from the lumbercamp workers; in other stanzas that were desperate and dirty like the weary roads where they were sung; and in still others that the singer created spontaneously in his own mouth then and there:
O, I done made ma bed,
Says I done made ma bed.
Down in some lonesome grave
I done made ma bed.
It closed with a sad eerie twang.
“That’s right decent,” said Hager. “Now I wish you-all’d play some o’ ma pieces like ‘When de Saints Come Marchin’ In’ or ‘This World Is Not Ma Home’—something Christian from de church.”
“Aw, mama, it’s not Sunday yet,” said Harriett.
“Sing ‘Casey Jones,’ ” called old man Tom Johnson. “That’s ma song.”
So the ballad of the immortal engineer
