Honeydripper, a film by John Sayles

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.

Slick came up inside the sporting life of Memphis, and his ambition, if it could be called anything so definite, was to become a respected player in Beale Street’s night world of bars, gambling clubs and whorehouses. But he cared too much whether people liked him, lacked the cold calculation needed to prevail in that hard, bright world and ended up as just another hopeful hanging onto the edges of the scene. His head for numbers and nose for a fixed deal weren’t good enough to get him over as a gambler, and his few stabs at pimping ended with the girls running all over him. He could dress the part and talk the talk, but all the other sports knew he was holding no cards of any value, that if you pushed him he would let it slide with a joke rather than come back at you with muscle, that the women went dreamy over his good looks but didn’t take him too seriously.

Slick was in his early twenties when Bertha Mae Spivey came to town with her show, emerging from giant mock-up of a Victrola in her feathered headdress and necklaces of gold and silver coins, that big, strong, sexy voice filling up the theater, thrilling him. And then afterwards, the hush in the bar when she strode in with her entourage, walked regally right up to him, straight up to no-count Slick Weathers and said “Let me buy you a drink, Sweet Sugar Man”. She was twenty years older and at the height of her fame and he was swept into the gravitational pull of her celebrity and the touring show business life, drinking with the musicians and hangers-on and the local sports in whatever town they hit, laughing at their jokes about him and “that old woman”, making a few of his own, winking and rolling his eyes, but proud that he was the one who she chose to put clothes on and show off and give spending money to as long as he was there to take care of the things she needed taking care of. There were a lot of other women in the early days, and she knew, she must have, but he was careful not to be too public with it and none lasted too long because within days or at the most weeks they would be off to another engagement, another town. And every night he would make it a point to sit in the audience, thinking when she filled the theater up with her big, beautiful voice, that she’s mine. Or I’m hers, it doesn’t matter which.

He wasn’t her booking agent in those days, or her dresser or her bandleader or her hair stylist or her chauffeur- she had people hired for all those things- he was her pretty man. A status came with that, despite all the jokes and ribbing, and he got to see the country in style. The only hard thing she asked of him was to learn to read, getting him a tutor and never mentioning it in public, and if his preferred text became the racing form it didn’t matter to Bertha Mae. When they’d come back through Memphis he could act the big shot, hand out free tickets, buy rounds for his old Beale Street boys. And he came to know her like nobody else knew her.

They’d be in the car, the chauffeur steering them through some sorry collection of shacks, with burnt-out men on the porches and raggedy-ass, hungry, barefoot kids running the road and she’d shake her head and say “This is where I come from”, no matter what part of the country they happened to be in, a lot of sadness and a little bit of fear in her eyes. The fear grew when the engagements moved to smaller theaters and then to tents and barrooms, when she had to let go of the dresser and the bandleader and the hair stylist and the chauffeur- Slick liked driving the car, so that last wasn’t so bad when it happened but it hurt Bertha Mae and one day she said “I’m getting out, Baby, while I still got a little lit of it left.” He was forty then, still had his looks and a suit for every day of the week, but it never occurred to him not to go with her.

Harmony, Alabama has been quiet after the bright lights and big cities, and Bertha Mae sings to herself more than she does to an audience these days. But he’s always been able to look around the Honeydripper and know he’s the best-dressed, finest looking man in the place, royalty in a way, gracing these commoners with his presence. She’s hasn’t been well in the last couple months, coughing and unable to sleep through the night, the business he takes care of for her more that of a nurse than a lover, and the cost of the medicine seems to be eating up their house one stick of furniture at a time. They had to sell the car. Though he tries not to think about it, lately there has been this nagging question- who is Slick Weathers, does he even exist, if he’s not Bertha Mae Spivey’s man?