Zeke has got two more deliveries on this run, then back to the warehouse and four more out of the county. He doesn’t have time to chitchat, just pay the bill and get your liquor off his truck. If you put the windows down you swallow dust all day, roll them up and you cook in that cab. Zeke hasn’t touched a drop in five years since he was born again, so he doesn’t really care to linger with those who purvey spirits. If he didn’t need the work he’d say a prayer to bring Prohibition back.
King Covington shouldn’t even be here. He wasn’t on the vag, he was just passing through on his way to Mobile to see his sister Emma, thought there was some work she could get him unloading cargo. But a deputy north of Birmingham had collected his last two dollars as a fine for wrong place, wrong time, wrong color, which meant he was caught with empty pockets thumbing for a ride out on the highway. It isn’t the first time. King has some skills, too, pretty fair blacksmith if only people needed mules how they used to, owner might have forty in his stable at one time, but that’s mostly over. So now he’s on the outside looking in, catching what little work he can on the fly, never seeming to catch on in one place for too long. He’s picked his share of cotton, breathed in a lifetime of dust and eaten his share of prison food. All he can hope for now is to work through this harvest and hope they get tired of feeding him when there’s no work left. Then catch a good ride for that last hundred miles to Mobile.
Time Trenier grew up in New Orleans about the same time the music grew up. There were so many bands, playing whatever people wanted to hear, inventing new sounds just to stand out from the others. Time used to dance on the street corners with his brothers, one beating time with spoons till the other got tired dancing and they’d switch. It always brought some change, and that’s when they started calling him “Time” because he could cut it into pieces that you could set your watch by, but always without losing the life-pulse. And if you wanted he could cut those pieces into pieces, he could syncopate and bend time, mess with it in all kinds of ways and it still sounded right, sounded good. When he wasn’t little and cute enough anymore to dance on the corners he took up with horns, anything you could blow except the trombone (his arms weren’t long enough yet). He played with Buddy Bolden’s band just before Bolden got confused and they took him off, played with King Oliver, play the marches and the riverboats, played the cathouses and the political rallies, played all over New Orleans and up the river.
There is life and there is music, and Time prefers nowadays to spend his hours inside the music. It is safe in there, interesting and satisfying and free in a way that nothing outside it is. Even if you don’t care about or like the people you’re playing for you can put yourself into the music and forget about them. Doesn’t matter what it is- he’s played ragtime and John Philip Sousa, barrelhouse blues and church music and enough of this new jump style to know it’s nothing new really, just something that was there before emphasized, the honk and the growl laid on heavy, pushing the instrument toward its rough and lowdown tones. He’s mostly a sax man lately, most comfortable with it, has spent his time backing up the trumpet and clarinet solos the big bands went for just a few years back. Just tell me what you want and how you want it, Time can deliver the goods with his chops just as good if not better than ever. The only thing he won’t do is lay on his back and kick his legs up in the air while he plays. There’s music and there’s circus tricks and the acrobats are in charge of the latter.
Time has been in for a drink and a listen at Ty Purvis’ club, the man knows his way around a piano but can’t lay out enough green to support more than a little combo. Time owns his own little house now, teaches a few lessons to pay for the groceries, and only occasionally misses the music life and everything that comes with it. He’s retired from the professional part of it, out running from gig to gig with the boys, but if somebody needs a sax man in the area and can pay up front he’s there. Whatever they’re playing he can grab himself a piece of it. Drop out and he’s there to fill in, or take a solo without missing a beat. He can read off a chart if that’s what’s needed, he can sit back and lay down a bed for a vocal to nestle in, can step up and blow his guts out through the horn if it’s a different kind of party. Just don’t ask him to rehearse.
Ned Turpin hit the road in ‘35 and hasn’t really stopped moving since. He’s picked cotton and cut timber and bucked barley and moved rails on a train track. He prefers to sleep inside but you get by with the circumstances you’re handed. He can’t quite remember when it was that he gave up on having something, being somewhere permanent, one woman, a place he called home. That just kind of slipped away as a possibility and now he’s living along the best he can. No sense worrying. If you got no plans, they can’t go wrong. He’s done this kind of vagrant time before, you just have to ride it out, keep your mouth shut when it needs to be shut, work enough when the man has got his eye on you and coast when he doesn’t. Ned likes red beans and cold beer and a honky tonk with enough women in it to make a fool of yourself. He did some boxing when he was younger, nothing big, just pick up a few bucks being an opponent, and he always managed not to get hit too hard. Surviving is winning. Some of these young ones, got lots of pride, lots of dreams, it makes him sorry to see them. They’ll learn soon enough. You fall in the river, makes no sense to be swimming upstream. Just let it take you along till you see a good spot to climb out. And if that don’t come, well- enjoy the ride.
Luther Cash gets nervous. Mr. Skinner at the store makes him nervous when he yells in that high whiny voice and gets all red in the face. Customers make Luther nervous when they want something the store doesn’t carry or that isn’t in stock right now or the last one just got sold and they act like it’s Luther’s fault. Girls make Luther nervous, especially China Doll, who is so pretty and like she might shatter if you were too rough with her, too loud. The country people make him nervous that they’re going to break something or step over the line, get Mr. Skinner thinking colored done it and it makes no difference which. Mr. Pinetop Purvis makes him nervous because they say he killed somebody. As the Reverend says in church, many are the traps and snares, the pits and sinkholes. Luther had a brother was killed over to Barbour County, talked back to the wrong man and one thing led to another till he was dying with his head stove in by a fence post. Luther is cautious and likes to see things in their proper place, which makes him the best clerk Mr. Skinner has ever had. Going to the Honeydripper or the Ace of Spades makes him nervous too, but that’s where the girls are Saturday nights and when the music gets going and people start dancing you sometimes forget all the things that could happen or people who might do you wrong and let it all go. That kind of nervous can make your heart fly.
Alton Stokely has been disappointed in love. He’s been disappointed in a lot of things, but two different women leaving him has been the worst. A man like him, got a skill, got his own business, shouldn’t be done that way. Not only is he the best sign-painter in three counties, he can spell better than most the people who hire him, white or black, he went all the way to Hampton before the Depression forced him out. So he drinks a little and gets in a mood now and then. Any man who doesn’t, the way the white folks got this country rigged up against you, there’s something wrong with him. It’s like you’re way up on a ladder, trying to do your trade, and the man down there is shaking it all the time. You complain a little bit and he’ll yank it right out from under you. Nobody ought to work, to live under those conditions. And the women, they see the worst side of you and they’re gone. Well good riddance.
Three nights out of four he can’t face those empty rooms any more, can’t look at that empty bed, and he’ll end up in Tyrone’s place. Toussaint’s is too noisy, all the young trash in there trying to show off for each other, but Ty pours an honest drink and plays a mean piano and they sing the old songs, none of this new monkey jump you hear on the radio or the juke box. Pour you your scotch and leave you alone. If his women had only figured out that’s all he needed. At least now he knows not to try to climb too far up, that they’ll pull you down every time. There’s other ways to get high.
Cool Breeze knows the score. The game is rigged, whether it’s politics or poker, and only suckers and fools play it straight. Cool Breeze grew up on the streets scuffling for pennies, doing errands for the right people and keeping his eyes open. He’s seen some big ones fall and some smaller ones- if they’re smart enough or hard enough or both- get big fast. It could happen for him, too, just got to wait for the right opening, the knowledge of what everybody else is holding, and then throw your cards down on the table. Lucky Hardaway makes his own luck, been a figure to deal with all the way back to Prohibition, and right now Cool Breeze is his number one ambassador. Out there explaining to the people what’s in their best interests, and if they too thick to see it, putting some muscle on them. He likes them smart or scared or both, cause when you’re dealing with Lucky it’s stupid not to be a little scared. The man has his moods. Which is why this piano player could be a problem- he’s not scared enough and he thinks he can beat the game, that he can go it alone when everybody knows without the right connections you can’t run any colored roadhouse. Make the white folks nervous and the black ones jealous. Man has been late on a few payments and that gets Lucky thinking, it’s no big money but why not put somebody else in there he can count on, move some product through the place, work some angles? What’s the percentage in just being a landlord? So Cool Breeze has got to drag his ass out to this sorry little cotton town, people got the lint still in their hair, clomping around in their dungarees and brogans, and straighten things out. How Lucky ever got hold of this place, out here at the end of the earth, is something Cool Breeze can’t figure. But if he gets any cowshit on his shoes somebody is going to pay.
You can close your eyes, poke your finger onto a map and Shack Thomas has been to where it lands. He’s done the north-south runs and the east-west runs, he’s been to both oceans and back. If the Pullman Company sends its cars there, Shack was riding. It has been his employment and his education Shack spreads the news, whether it is transporting the colored papers from city to city or just retelling the tales he’s heard on the road, bringing news to that uncle in Chicago, carrying money back to that mother in Clarksdale. Shack is for black folks what the telephone is for white ones. And the greatest bonus, greater than the biggest tip the flashiest sport ever passed him for finding a bottle during the dry years, is the leader, E. Phillip Randolph. The man is an education in himself. The uniform may still turn heads when you pass through, especially in the little one-train-a-week towns, but nothing puts your chin up and authority in your step like knowing the man who represents you in the world is a warrior, a force that the highest and mightiest have to deal with. Some of the young ones are starting to make fun, to shuffle and call out “I get your coat, Suh?”, “Any little thing I can get you, Suh?” like the uniform, the job, is something to be ashamed of. Jealousy, is all- they’ve got no organization, no brotherhood, no A. Phillip Randolph at the head of their march, straight and steady and always pushing ahead.
Shack doesn’t come through Harmony much any more, and when he does he likes to hop off for a day or two, hear what’s in the wind, see his sister and his niece and a certain widow and eat some home food till the next ride comes through. And spread the word. Brother Randolph can’t do it all by himself, he’s got to have his legion of brothers out there working with him, keeping the fire burning. Engine won’t go unless you feed that fire.
His sister Delilah has got herself with a good man now, Tyrone Perkins who runs the kind of roadhouse where a man never has to watch his back. He’s stubborn, though, and thinks he can do it all on his own, and that’s always got to make you worry. But Delilah has gotten a stand-up, stomp-down, look-you-in-the-eye man to be father to her little China Doll, Delilah who used to be so sad and down on herself, coming up in the world now without hurting a living soul to do it. Can’t complain about that. Shack has got his first family in Brownsville and a second one in St. Louis and who knows, maybe another one about to come along up in Detroit. It takes a lot of rolling hours to feed all those mouths, but feed them he will. A lot of bags to lift and coats to check and meals to carry, an awful lot of smiling and nodding ahead, but hey, somebody’s got to spread the word.
The Reverend Aaron Cutlip is a fisherman for souls. He can feel it when he snags them and feel it when he loses them, knows how to set the hook and play them, how to reel them in slowly. He feels great joy with he lands one for good. He had his own church once, with a good solid congregation, and that had its satisfactions. But the politics of small town life, the constant exhortation for funds, the backsliding and backstabbing began to vex him and the lure of the hunt, the excitement of casting the Holy Word into the wild sea of sinners and hauling souls out of the deep was too strong. He’s been running the revivals throughout southern Alabama and Mississippi for five years now, week-long celebrations of song and spirit, bringing the fire of truth and the thunder of his God-given voice to the hinterlands. It isn’t only the big cities where wickedness dwells- poor country people get up to their own share of devilment, they need to be snapped back to the path of righteousness now and then, they hunger for the body-wrenching exaltation that can only come when the Spirit is high. Music is part of it, and the choir will get them warmed up, start the Spirit moving, but he’s the one that has to work it deep, the one in charge of the rhythm. The tent is part of it too, out of the familiar four church walls, surrounded by the black night- he’s learned from the carnival pitchmen selling their Indian tonics, learned even from the profane blues shouters on the street corner who can build a crowd and work it for a hatful of change. Reverend Cutlip has been given a gift and he knows it, he revels in the opportunity to win folks over for Jesus. There is no job more important in the world than to be a soldier in the army of the Lord. If you have to coax, you coax, if you have to bully, you bully- the bait doesn’t matter as long as you hook them and bring them in. Because time is running short, people act like there’s no tomorrow when the Judgement Day could be on us in an instant. And when it happens, when that day of glory and terror arrives, Aaron Cutlip will be able to step up proud and say “Lord, just look how many I brought you!”
Amanda was born a Shiflett, which in Butler County is something lower than dirt. Known as white trash sharecroppers, poachers, chicken thieves, moonshine drinkers, snake handling backwoods people, it was a large and embarrassing clan for a little girl who liked to dream about being a princess to belong to. There was the having no shoes at school and the other kids laughing, her brothers and cousins torturing her and terrorizing their non-relatives, the grease and grits for weeks on end, the hand-me-down dresses that never fit and weren’t so nice when they were new. She was always pretty though, and well-behaved in school, and in the fifth grade she fell head over heels for Miss Abernathy who was delicate and refined and tried to teach them to speak properly. Amanda knew better than to talk like that at home in punching distance of her brothers, but would practice Miss Abernathy’s slightly breathless, singing way of speech when she told stories to herself or had imaginary conversations. It only lasted a year, as the sharecropper children- from eight to fourteen years old in the same classroom- pretty much ruined Miss Abernathy’s nerves in just one term. Amanda, though, had had a glimpse of a person she hoped someday to be, and when the others were hollering and thrashing in the aisles at the little storage-shed church her Uncle Bemus ran, she would close her eyes and pray for transformation. But every time she opened then again the room was still full of Shifletts and their even less reputable cousins, the Louvins, rolling their eyes and crying for God’s hard justice.
It was almost a miracle that she came to be in school in Harmony and catch the eye of Floyd Winship. First her brother Del off to jail for the stabbing, then a neighbor poisoning the mules and the landowner deciding they were just too much trouble. Pa got on with the town, cleaning the horse-puckey off the street every evening and twice on market days. Amanda was the first to get that far in school- she was a good reader and polite to the teachers and they would shake their heads and say “Honey, you sure your name is Shiflett?” which hurt and made her proud at the same time. Floyd was very sweet when they started keeping company- he had to keep it discrete of course but that was the way it was back then- and they had been courting nearly a full year before he began to take liberties. It was quite a little scandal when she got pregnant with Emily- her father hinting that the right amount of cash would convince him to pull up stakes and get his wayward daughter out of their lives, Floyd’s father going on about the danger to the old and respected Winship name, but Floyd prevailed, even took her down to the draft board in Montgomery with her little belly showing once they were married to avoid being shipped off to the Great War.
Their early years together were troubled but little Emily was there and just golden- “a real Winship” her grandfather called her- and she favored that side of the family in looks and temperament. Floyd’s mother taught her how to keep house with a maid and how to dress and how to entertain, always that tight smile on her face like it hurt a little when she introduced Amanda to friends. Floyd was away mostly even if it was just on Main Street, doing accounts for his father and studying law. She had thought they would have lots of friends, couples their own age, but Floyd did his socializing with the other men at the Lodge and then the hunting and the trips to New Orleans for whatever business it was you could do down there. At first there was old Aunt Ida who had been with Floyd’s family forever, resentful over having been loaned out to clean for this redneck girl who’d never had a proper house to keep clean before, a heavy, dark woman with a perpetual scowl. Then when Aunt Ida passed there was a series of girls Floyd’s mother found for her, but none caught on till Delilah came to the door one day just before the 2nd war started and Floyd’s mother, may she rest in peace, no longer lived next door. Emily was gone and married to Albert Crimmins in Tampa by then, so long away, and already it seemed too difficult, dangerous even, to leave the house. So many disapproving eyes. Floyd would still bring her to church of course, but there was the proof, every look saying “you don’t really belong here” and by the time the sermon was over her hands would be trembling. But Delilah was sweet and soft-spoken and never scowled at the dirt like it was Amanda’s fault for it being there, plus she brought her little China Doll who would climb up in Amanda’s lap to be read to when she wasn’t playing her secret games under the dining room table. It filled the house up, even on days when they barely talked. Floyd approved because the food Delilah left was so good and because Amanda never felt she had to hide in bed like with some of the others. Now that he’s mayor Floyd is home even less and when he is he barely talks except for his idea that she drinks too much. Even if she did, who is there to see it?
She wonders, sometimes, what would have happened if she’d remained a Shiflett, married somebody who never had a respected name or a linoleum rug on the floor- would she feel so- so embarrassed all the time? Some of them must still be out there alive, Shifletts and Louvins causing trouble, but it seems so far away and so hard to keep track of. If Delilah didn’t insist on pulling all the shades up you’d hardly know if it were day or night.
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