If I Don't Go Crazy

David Kirby

There's a sheriff's car parked near Emerald Mound,

and the deputy is looking down at his lap and smiling,

which means he's probably doing what everyone else is doing

these days, that is, texting, though I think he's knitting a quilt

out of the scalps（头皮，战利品） he's taken off travelers like me:

a killer has been working these country roads of late

with a blue flashing light, pulling people over and shooting

them for fun, like the men who lived in caves on the Natchez

Trace in the day and who killed travelers for money and then

because they found out how much they liked killing.

Historian Robert Coates says these men would have been

like others if they'd stayed back east, though once they entered

the wilderness, they opened their own hearts

to the dark heart of the continent, breathed in its perfumed

appeal, beheld the terrible flowering of their madness,

and revealed by their violence how different they were

from other men, and I like this, it makes sense,

but I wonder if those men might not have been okay if they'd just

had girlfriends. It's one big black and white movie

when your baby's not in the picture, that's for sure:

promoter Dick Waterman wakes one morning to the sound

of blues man Robert Pete Williams playing his guitar

and singing softly, and when Waterman says That's

beautiful, you should play that at your shows, Williams

says Oh, no, that's not music, I'm just talking to my Hattie

Mae and telling her I'll be home as soon as I can.

What are the blues? A good man feeling bad, say some, while others say

it's a man losing his woman or the other way around.

If I don't go crazy, says Son House, I'm going to lose my mind.

Damned straight: you're working twelve-hour days

at the Dockery or Stovall Plantation and can barely get up most

mornings and owe more than you earn, but you can play

and sing a little, and there's this gal（姑娘，加仑） who looks at you from time

to time, and her name is Louise McGhee, and you tell her

you're playing at the Honeydipper this Saturday and ask

if she'd like to come hear you, and she smiles and says yes,

yes, I would, and on the night of the show, you wait for the other

fellows to finish and you get up there and say How's everybody

doing tonight and you look out into the crowd, and sure

enough, there's Louise, your pearl beyond price, your last

chance at happiness in a world where a man works like

an animal till the day he dies and lands in jail if he drinks

too much or looks at the wrong person the wrong way,

but she's with another fellow, and it's like she can't keep

her hands off him, and you grin and you sing, but inside

you're thinking, God damn every goddamned thing to hell,

and when you finish, there's some coins in your tip jar

and even a dollar bill or two, and a couple of fellows pull

their pints out, and you take a few sips, long ones,

but on your way home, when you know nobody's watching,

you grab your guitar like a baseball bat and swing it

against a tree. How do you write the song that gets the girl?

If we knew the answer to that one, we'd all have somebody.

Ma Rainey is a vaudeville（杂耍，轻歌舞剧） singer in 1902 when she hears

a young miss in a little town sing what she later describes

as a "strange and poignant（尖锐的，心酸的） lament" about a bad man,

so Ma starts doing the song herself, and suddenly America

hears the blues. A year later, W. C. Handy is cooling his heels

late one night in the Tutwiler, Mississippi train station when,

in his words, he dozes and wakes to the sounds of a "lean,

loose-jointed Negro" pressing a knife blade to his guitar

strings and playing "the weirdest music I had ever heard."

Mr. Handy doesn't know whether he's dreaming this

or not: "Going where the Southern cross the Dog,"

says the singer, that is, where the Southern Line intersects

the Yazoo & Mississippi, the crossroad, which is where,

finally, you have a choice, because you thought you were

going one place in your life and now you see you can go

left or right or even back home, if you want, but no,

you want to go someplace new, someplace you haven't

been before, even if it's way the hell out in the country,

out there by the cemetery, the one so old they don't even

bury folks in it these days, and the wind's picking up,

and a man steps over a fallen headstone, a big man,

and he has something in his hands, and you don't know

if it's a rifle or an axe, something he could hurt or even kill

you with, and you can't see his face, but he holds out this thing

he's carrying, and it's a guitar, and he says, "Here,

I tuned this for you, take it," and you know if you do, you'll be lost,

but you'll do anything to get that woman back,

anything at all, so you rest that guitar on your knee

and you run your thumb down the strings, and a thousand birds

cry at once, and the smell of lavender rises from

the hard ground at your feet, and you think you see a line

of people against the sky's last light but you can't tell

where they're going, and you glance at the trees, and their

branches are thick with slave ships and Spanish galleons,

and you say "Who the hell are you?" and the man shakes

his head and points, and his mouth doesn't move,

and a voice you never want to hear again says, "Play."