Honeydripper, a film by John Sayles

When Nadine was a little girl she saw a dress in a Montgomery Ward catalogue that she wanted so bad it hurt. She pointed it out to her mother, who just said “Yeah, that’s real pretty,” and let the matter drop. Nadine wished and wished and the dress never came and one day her mother caught her crying over it. When she found out what the problem was she brought Nadine into town and bought some cloth and then sat her down at the sewing machine with the picture of the dress torn out from the catalogue. It took her a month of working on it after school and lots of false starts but at the end she had herself a dress just like the one in the picture and her mother had taught her to sew. From then on she decided to never just sit and wait for anything she wanted in life, but to go out and get it.

The hard lesson has been that once you’ve got it, it might not be so nice. Or it might be worse, especially if it’s a man, and turn into a real nightmare. No use waiting around for it to go away then- time to take your life in your own hands. Any grief they’ve put you through gets paid back double. Nadine has lived in and around Harmony, Alabama most her life, has seen Maceo Green around through all the years and heard about him being a bootlegger and a ladies’ man, but the fact is that everything she’s seen of him she likes, there’s just such a glow to the man when he lights up that smile. So this isn’t a crush it’s a campaign, she’s taking her time to do it right and thorough, like any important job, and when it’s done and she’s got him it will be tight. Nadine Spears doesn’t drop any stitches.

Junebug Johnson has lived around Harmony most of his life. His father was a sharecropper till that went bad for him and they moved into town. There are worse places. Junebug mostly works at the sawmill rough-cutting pine boards but they shut down for harvest time and everybody comes out to pick cotton. Junebug has too much energy, always has, and sometimes it comes out his mouth and sometimes it comes out his feet. He’ll be just sitting, tapping his feet without knowing it. The bosses like him because he is a quick worker and doesn’t seem to tire and the women like him because he can dance. The music, if it’s hot, shoots even more energy into him and who can stand still when they’re playing like that? Junebug usually can get along with the migrant pickers, even gets along with the colored soldiers when they come off the base- wouldn’t make him feel any better to win a fight and it would make him feel a whole lot worse to lose one. Yeah, the outsiders are competition for the women, but when the music starts up Junebug owns that floor.

Bertha Mae Spivey was born in Lowndes County, Alabama, in 1880. Her mother, who died young of the tuberculosis, had a beautiful voice. Her father played bass drum and was in charge of putting up a tent for a traveling medicine show, performing in blackface. Bertha Mae grew up on the road, often sleeping out in a wagon under the stars, dancing to fiddle and harmonica in the show by the time she was eight, always aware that show people were different. Her first husband, the love of her life, died of yellow fever while serving in the Spanish war in Cuba. Her second, a trumpet player addicted to Chinese opium and racetracks, ran off with a contortionist. By then Bertha Mae was in her early twenties, a featured singer on the southern circuit, billed as “the Belle of Cotton Country” and warbling sentimental favorites. Older men wanted to protect her, and she let a few of them, for a while. One became her manager, who protected her from having too much money by investing all her savings in a poker game that he left, cold, on a mortician’s stretcher.

She played Tampa and Jacksonville and Valdosta and Macon, Atlanta, Charleston, Wilmington, Washington, Lexington, Memphis, Jackson, Birmingham, Montgomery, Shreveport, Baton Rouge and New Orleans and pretty much every town between them. In New Orleans she sang with Jelly Roll Morton and all the others and picked up the new sound they were creating, a style she could put her dead lover and her cheating trumpet player and her card-playing manager and all the rest of it into and pretty soon her billing was “Baroness of the Blues”, coming out with an ermine cape and a crown of feathers, singing sad and low then hot and sexy then sly and funny. First it was traveling in the nicest of the colored passenger cars, then she had a whole show around her- musicians and jugglers and comedians and dancers and even her own dressing room when she got there- up to Chicago and Detroit and Cleveland, the places country people had run to escaping the rope and torch and Jim Crow indignities, looking for a better life. The Paramount company recorded her, with Tampa Red and Georgia Tom (who later got religion and wrote “Precious Lord”) backing her up, and the records sold and led to even better bookings, as well as the nicest of the colored hotels and her own dresser and hair stylist and chauffeur, what the Creoles in New Orleans would call an entourage. There were still older men who wanted to protect her but by now she could protect herself, you had to go through so many people to even get near her and then it was the Baroness they were after and not a forty year old woman lonely in a strange town.

She had a few pretty ones before Slick, who were happy to spend whatever money she gave them and go out and brag and get in trouble, but he was the first one she sensed something sweet and real in, a twenty year old with big eyes for the glitter but no fence around his heart. And he came to hear her sing every night, every night, sat near the front with a big happy smile on his pretty face, really listening as if he’d never heard those songs a thousand times. He’d go off and be naughty now and then, probably something wrong with him if he hadn’t, but he knew who his Sweet Momma was, was there when she was so tired she could cry, knew how to touch her, how to talk to her.

When the stock market crashed so did the record company and so did the circuit, a slow-motion crash for Bertha Mae that saw the hotel rooms get smaller and the audiences thin out and the chauffeur and the dresser and the hair stylist let go, singing with the house musicians now instead of carrying her own band and it was too bad because she was singing better than ever. One night singing in a club that was more of a warehouse in Mobile she saw more customers passed out than conscious, only Slick with his big sweet smile really listening to her, and decided it was time to come off the road.

They were driving to visit her mother’s people, Slick the chauffeur now, when they passed through Harmony and saw the house for sale. They were talking to the owner on the front steps for less than ten minutes but when she turned to go there were two dozen faces staring up from the street, come to see the Baroness in the flesh. The War was just starting then, lively times in the county what with the Army base full up, and when Tyrone Purvis who she knew by reputation- good steady piano man, always on time, burns up the keys- appeared in her parlor with his hat in his lap asking would she like to appear at his new roadhouse it sounded like fun. And it was, the Army boys hungry for any entertainment and clapping and laughing and some of them even knew who she was, or had been. It was the nice part of performing without the grind of the road. She had Slick negotiate her fee, of course, give him some sense of being the one in control, and he always paid for his drinks at the Honeydripper like a gentleman. Strange to feel sad at the War ending.

It’s been hard lately, nobody much in the club, singing for herself more than anything else, and then all the ailments. So hard to sleep. And something new, a prickling on her skin, a fear in the pit of her stomach. She hasn’t been frightened of anything in so long.

Sheriff Pugh has been the big man in Butler County for twelve years now, and he’s got ambitions. He’s doing pretty well for somebody whose daddy ran moonshine during Prohibition, somebody who grew up hearing teachers say he’d be real smart if he ever applied himself to it, somebody who could just as easily be locked up in the jail as be the one carrying the keys. His daddy mostly worked as a mechanic at the cotton gin on the old Moultrie plantation, could fix any kind of machine, build a still and keep it running. The Pughs never had any of their own land, just a line of sawmill hands and redneck lumbermen, piney woods people, and if it hadn’t been for Hiram being so good with his fists he’d have ended up another one. His knockout combination was a lightning fast right jab followed by the left, a combination hook and uppercut, that got him the ring name of Hiram “One-Two” Pugh in the country fair bouts and smoky arenas of Birmingham and Montgomery. He was middleweight state champion when he decided to hang the gloves up after a twelve-round decision in Pascagoula that left his teeth loose, his ears ringing and his opponent blind in one eye. He fibbed a bit to the doctor to pass the physical and joined the state troopers. He liked police work, especially the manhunts when somebody would skip from prison or a work gang, liked the camaraderie and packing a pistol and the uniform. He even learned to ride a horse for parades. When old Clell Hopgood announced his retirement, Hiram got the Moultries and a few other important families back home to support him an he won the sheriff job without much trouble.

It’s a pretty quiet county and he puts a lot of time in keeping it that way. You got to keep your ears open, don’t let things out of control. The letter of the law is a lot less important to people than control, or at least the appearance of it. People want their vice and their virtue, their black and their white, kept separate and right where they know how to find them. Somebody gets a little too big for their britches and you give them a polite warning before you take them down. More than once Hiram has had a heart-to-heart with that skinny drunk Hank Williams who’s all over the radio these days- the boy was always a mess and it’s a wonder he’s lasted this long. Sure can sing, though. Hiram married Maxine Cantrell during his first term and they’ve got a couple little featherweights running around the yard, always trying to step into their daddy’s boots when he comes home. Maxine has it good but doesn’t know it- can’t cook, won’t clean, too ornery to keep help in the house, got a husband who doesn’t gamble or drink up his paycheck and she’s nothing but one big complaint. “Big Jim Folsom is the Governor,” he likes to tell her, “till he leaves the mansion we’ll have to make do right here.”

Not that he wouldn’t like to aim for something bigger. That Wallace boy from over in Clayton is moving up, building himself a team that could lead to something if you jumped on it at the right moment. The biggest problem on the horizon is the Army base opened up again, this time with colored in there marching around with rifles like anybody else. Not only do they come off on leave with all their attitude but they stir the local bucks up, give them big ideas. Tyrone Purvis, well he’s always been a high-stepper, but smart enough not to push in the wrong places. Keeps his business where it belongs, never had a murder out there. But it’s the ones that think they can go it alone, a law unto themselves you might say, who you’ve got to watch. His wife is a pretty looking little thing, though, and they put out the best ribs and chicken in the county. The ones like Tyrone you got to play like a fish on your bait, while others of them only understand the fat end of a club. Any of these Army boys think they can act out of their station in Harmony and get away with it have a rude awakening in store for them. No shortage of cotton that needs picking, ditches need digging, roads need grading. No brag to it, but Hiram Pugh runs the best damn work gangs in the state of Alabama.

Hamilton Drinkwater grew up in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, and has been working cotton as long as he can remember. His father moved around the county sharecropping, a big man, good with mules, and Ham was right in the middle of twelve kids. There were still good places for hunting and fishing when he was a kid and that’s what he loved the most, out bobbing for catfish or cooters, chasing rabbits, watching the hawks overhead. And he was good with mules too, and grew big like his father who even in the middle of the Depression could make a paying crop on twenty acres of sand. The people who owned the land pretty much left his father alone, in fact the white people fought with each other sometimes to get him to work shares on their old plantations, and for a couple years they had a wagon and three mules and tools enough to rent and keep the whole crop themselves, but the bottom fell out of the cotton market and one of the mules got sick and died and another was bit by a rattler. Ham was as much help as he could be but as his mother always said, it was tough for his abilities to keep up with his appetite. They were respected people in the area, though, and people would come to his mother for cures that she cooked up from roots and bark. Ham grew up thinking he would do all right living the same kind of life, especially if he could get Hallie Gaines who stayed out on the Tutwieler place to live it with him. He saw her at church or now and then at a dance, and she maybe liked him because she always looked back and smiled and would say hi whether he did first or not.

But the draft found Ham just after the War started up and he was put in the Navy, shipped off to California to load ammunition onto ships. It was hot and dangerous work and the men beside him, from everywhere in the country that had colored people, weren’t always so friendly. There were some fights, and Ham always did fine till once he got knocked cold from behind with a lug wrench and vowed never to step into battle again unarmed. The officers called them deck apes and there was only one or two little sad-ass places they could drink when off-duty. There was a lot of drinking, and the girls who weren’t much to write home about but not too expensive on Navy pay. Then that ship blew up while being loaded at Port Chicago and it felt like they were on a prison gang, shore patrolmen always around with their rifles, a sour mood all the way up until they dropped the A-bomb on the Japs. It took almost another year before they let him out and by the time he made it back home things had changed. His father wasn’t so big any more, looking kind of broken and struggling to get by on ten acres, and Hallie Gaines had married one of the Rice brothers and had babies, and a lot of the plantations in the county were going over to tractors now for plowing and some even had the machine pickers which tore hell out of the plants but was so much cheaper.

Ham began to drift with the crops, hiring on to do whatever needed a lot of muscle and not much sense. Being good with mules doesn’t count for much anymore. He has the slow burning resentment of a man who has been made useless for a few years now, just living along, and if he knew a way out he would take it. Maybe after this harvest season he can get something together, maybe even save up to buy his own land like his father always wanted to do. At least here in Alabama it’s legal to drink and the migrant housing doesn’t smell bad. There’s always the Army again- word is they’re letting black men carry a rifle in this one. There certainly are days when he wouldn’t mind killing somebody.

Dexter Moncrief was born just east of Little Rock at the very beginning of the Great Depression. Dex was to young to pick cotton when his family lived in the country, barefoot and unable to see over the highest of the plants- he didn’t like the look of it then and he doesn’t like it now. His father took a chance there was more work in the city and they moved across the border to Memphis, but things didn’t work out so well for him. He had to jump a freight like so many other men and boys, promising to send money back or send for the family when he found a job, and then the country just swallowed him up.

So Dex’s mother took in washing and sewed and sent the boys out in the winter to scrounge for coal or run errands for small change. Dex was one of the smallest but he was fast and furious and if you wanted to take a nickel off him you were going to damn well have to fight him for it. The best tips came from the Beale Street sports, the guys with the nice clothes who didn’t want to leave the crap game when the action was hot to run for cigarettes, the ones who called you “little man” and would watch, amused, if they saw you scrapping with someone, never breaking the fight up, but willing to give you some pointers when it was all over. There was nothing as exciting or as dangerous as that sporting life going on with his mother and five brothers and sisters in their little shack with the newspaper on the walls and the wind blowing through all winter and pretty soon he was spending every minute he could around the downtown scene, learning what was up, seeing the threats and the put-downs and the fights that turned bloody. He saw that if you ever backed down in public you were through, there would be no end of challenges, of shit you had to eat. But if you made it clear that messing with you, win or lose, was a whole world of trouble, you were given a little space at the table. Dex started running numbers when he was ten.

Numbers was pennies then and it was okay unless you were bold enough to run a little hustle and make it dimes and quarters, to not tell your banker about a new customer or a hunch bet from someone not a regular player and keep the whole thing in your pocket, praying please, number, don’t you dare hit me. All the runners, the smart ones, did it, and only a few got caught. Take that and organize a little crap game, hold the money yourself- the house always wins. Or you could sell the watches and tie pins and jewelry you got from Hot Gus to the sports who knew a bargain, literally a steal, when they saw one. The draft passed Dex over because he was in jail when the War broke out, six months for car theft though he was only a passenger and the guy said he’d just bought it that morning. Jail was just like the Beale Street joints only meaner, he had to brain another prisoner with a shovel the second day in and when he got out of solitary they pretty much left him alone. He made a connection inside and got on with the big time boys when he was released. Helping to run a gaming club, shilling sometimes, dealing, he learned how the whole machine worked and that unless you were very smart or very bold you never moved up. He started clipping a little here and there, not so much that they’d notice it gone with all the money running through the place, but something went wrong, maybe somebody ratted him out, and you mess with those people’s money and they catch you it’s not pretty. Dex went out the window of his hotel room with his pants in his hand and nothing in the pockets.

So here he is in exile, just taking some time out is all, planning his next move, and if any of these burr-headed, clodhopper-wearing, backwards country boys press him too close they gonna find out who they dealing with real fast. Cause Dexter Moncrief is not a man to be trifled with.

Possum was there when Buddy Bolden sat down in the middle of a funeral march and forgot his own name. Possum was there when the riverboat bands played up and down the Mississippi, when the first young black man threw down the plow for the music life, when Robert Johnson died howling in pain from the poison in his gut. It was Possum, sitting on a flatcar in a railroad station and playing for himself, who W.C. Handy heard and wrote it down as the blues. Possum knows what you’ve been up to, knows how you feel. He knows when to be there and when to disappear. He gets under your skin.

He can play the music simple or he can get it talking back to itself, get a whole roomful of voices going on the strings. He bends the notes sometimes because it feels right and because people aren’t that simple, right in the same evening they can slide on you, bend their moods from one thing to another. And if the trombone man can do it, why not the guitar? Possum can make you cry with a song that sounds happy and make you laugh at one that is mean and ugly. He sits just a little outside of life, hearing people’s dramas, their little hopes and fears and jealousies, and smiles cause it’s all already been done in one of the songs. He knows how when you’re poor and miserable and a little bit drunk the music can be a reminder that somebody has been poorer, more miserable, drunker than you. And he knows how the music can lift you out of your body, out from behind your plow, your cotton row, your chain-gang slogging and up somewhere else where it’s easier to breathe.

Possum has known Tyrone since he first sat on a piano bench, but only came to speak to him, to play for him, after he killed that boy in a barroom fight. Tyrone is afraid now, cornered, and Possum has to push him a little to see which way he’ll go, what he’s really made of. The music is moving on and Tyrone is hesitating, not sure he can follow it anymore, and this young one, this Sonny who’s made his own box out of wood and wires and electricity, is full to bursting with what the next sound is going to be. Be an awful shame if that train just passed Tyrone by without stopping, an awful shame if that guitar boy didn’t get to ever sit with a piano man who can really play, play the ivory right off them keys. These two people, Tyrone and Sonny, have got to meet somehow. And that’s where Possum comes in, cause he is the place where their music was born.

Sonny Blake grew up in Arkansas near the Texas border helping his father crate people’s goods around in his wagon and listening to any music that came his way. White hillbillies and black blues pickers and Mexican serenaders- if they could sing and play Sonny was watching, listening, taking it in. His father sang some as they hauled the loads, old timey songs with good stories in them and his mother played a fiddle sometimes in church. Born at the beginning of the Depression, Sonny spent a lot of nights listening to the distant radios of the people who had electricity and trying not to think about his empty stomach. Once they stopped and listened to a hillbilly band playing in front of a microphone in the courthouse square, and that combination of the music and the amplification, the electric boost and thrilling distortion, went right to Sonny’s heart. When he starting daydreaming about playing music himself it was always in front of lots of people and through a microphone.

His father’s horse died and there wasn’t enough to buy a new one and then his mother passed and there wasn’t so much reason to stay put. He had a guitar of his own by then, an acoustic from a mail-order catalogue and he went right from learning A Spanish Fandango from the instruction booklet that came with it to trying to figure out the things T-Bone Walker was putting on his records. He started his wandering- Oklahoma, Missouri, Texas- playing for nickels on the street and picking up little jobs here and there. He could make things work, mechanical things, electrical things, that had been broken. He was back to visit his relatives on the Arkansas side in the last year of the War when the draft board caught up to him, old enough now to be in the Army.

Sonny trained with a support unit, black soldiers learning to drive trucks, and when his tinkering skills were discovered he was transferred to the Signal Corps and sent to Japan, bombed-out and defeated now, and set to repairing communications equipment. There were a few guys who could play in his outfit and they’d get together and do whatever everybody knew the chords to, trying to lure the sullen local girls a little closer. They shipped him back and dumped him in Oklahoma and he’s been on the road ever since, trying to catch on as a musician. He’s worked up his own electric guitar, double coil solid body music machine, something he’s starting to hear about but never actually seen anybody play, and to him it sounds better than what T-Bone or Blues Boy King or even Guitar Sam are putting out on the radio. He’s got ideas for the music, too- there’s fighter jets and rockets and automobiles that can go seventy miles and hour, people are mostly all hooked up to the juice, to the power now and the music has to reflect that, things are moving faster. Maybe not in this little backwater cotton town in Nowheres Alabama, but once they hear him throw down his sound they’ll pick up the pace a little too. He’s only here cause the train heading for New Orleans runs through it and a man’s got to eat once in a while. So getting famous on the radio will have to wait a few more days.

Delilah Brown knows she owes somebody something. She felt like she wasn’t worth much her whole life and most people seemed to agree with her, say something nice about her singing but then go on and treat her like nothing so it had to be something wrong in her, some devilment she wasn’t strong enough to wrestle down. Her father was a preacher who wrestled and lost and went back to sin and disappeared out of their lives and her mother too, shouting and crying at the Sunday services but then back to her gin and her men who always left. Delilah was only thirteen when those men started turning toward her when her mother wasn’t around, and it was powerful and scary and who was she to tell a grown man no? Till her mother got jealous and turned her out and the one little thing she could do, sing, only paid if you did it in bars full of more men who would always leave you.

Delilah had two babies before, babies that she lost in their first tiny days, which seemed only righteous since she had given herself over to the men and the gin but didn’t bother with the Sunday services, knew that everyone in the church had her pegged for a hopeless sinner, and then China Doll so little and frail with her rheumatic heart and Delilah tried hard, tried to win her little girl at least a nest to lie down in every night but that kind of solid ground never landed under her feet and she wasn’t strong enough. Men came up to say her singing had made them cry and then they’d be with her just long enough to return the favor. She felt she was sliding down into a pit, clawing at the sides but they were too slippery to hold and somehow one day there was Tyrone, a man whose name she’d seen on a dance poster, a man with hands that could wrap around so much and he looked into her and saw her for what she was and what she could be if she was strong enough and he didn’t leave. He left physically, off on his tours playing piano, but when he said he’d write he wrote and when he said he’d call he called and when he said he’d be back in a month there he was. And China Doll, who usually caused men’s smiles to glaze over when she was introduced into the equation, Ty just wrapped his hands around her skinny hips and picked her up into his face and said “Look what fell out from the Cracker Jacks. Do I get to keep it?”. Now what did Delilah Brown ever do to deserve a man like that?

And she’s been so good to him, steady and true and hard-working, but who wouldn’t be? Brought in what money she could working for the Mayor and Miss Amanda and then sang or helped out at the Honeydripper every night no matter how tired she was. To see China Doll in her same little bed every night and going to school and growing, and Ty treating her, Delilah Brown, like somebody special in front of all those people in the club, a woman would have to be crazy or even weaker than her to mess that up. So she’s given back to Ty. But lately the feeling has changed, his place is near empty every night and he’s worried and moody, he’s scared, which she’s never seen before, and it’s got to be a retribution on her, like when they took her first babies, and maybe, just maybe if she gives herself over, not just going on Sundays and singing along from Sinners’ Row but really gives herself over and is born again in the eyes of the Lord in heaven He will forgive her all that sinful life before and not let anything bad happen to Ty or China Doll. Sometimes, in the heat of the singing and the praying and swaying and tears of penitence it feels so right, the Spirit moving within her, but then again sometimes it feels like the Spirit is carrying her away from Ty, off to some place he can’t or won’t follow and that he needs her now and the Lord can wait. Standing at that crossroads- do you get a sign from above or just feel it in your soul?

What China Doll remembers from before they met her father is being sick and being carried from place to place, sleeping in a strange spot, often not a bed, almost every night and often the music and voices loud from the next room. If it was her mother singing it was easier to sleep, knowing for sure she was still out there. They said it was rheumatic fever and that it could kill her so she shouldn’t be running around with the other kids or worry her heart about anything. Mostly her knees and elbows hurt really bad. Staying in away from the other kids gave her lots of time to sit alone and dream up stories, some of them about the places she might go and things she might do and others about good things that could happen. One of her favorites was about a big, nice, handsome man who would come to marry her mother and be her father and all of a sudden there he was.

At first she was supposed to call him “Mr. Pinetop” or just “Sir” but once, after he’d been around for awhile but before they left Shreveport for Alabama and there was the wedding she called him Daddy and was afraid it was a mistake but he just turned and said “What is it, baby?”. She has worked extra hard in school, has helped out as much as she can at the club to make him proud of her and he never gets impatient when her weak heart slows her down. Most important of all, before him her mother was sad all the time, not just when she was singing about it but all the time, and now she’s not.

China Doll likes to work with hair and likes how different it is on everybody’s head, likes how different the people are, and likes to think of herself doing heads all over the country and maybe out in the world beyond it. She knows the local boys too well from school and now the older ones from how they act when they come into the Honeydripper, and she is not impressed. She’d like to skip past the being sad all the time part and go right to where she meets the big, nice, handsome man. He doesn’t have to be a musician, but it wouldn’t hurt.