The Yazoo Blues. John Pritchard
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at the time: Well, hell, what’s the matter with callin’ em the Hoe Hands? I didn’t say nothin’ about it because hoe hands, black or white, was about to get just about as scarce as mallards was; plus, very few of them little diklikkers that suited up on the high school football team had ever knowed anything about choppin’ cotton. Not all of em, but a lot of em, was just a buncha townfukkas and one way or another was hooked into them planters.
Finally, though, later on in the 1960s, the niggas come in and took over the public school, and the whites, natchaly, went off and built their own prissy-ass school, which they decided to refer to as a academy, so now if you want to know the truth, I don’t know what none of em call their gotdam teams. Fukkum. I don’t keep up with it. Plus, I don’t know what a bug-bumpin’ academy is, unless it’s to make them chillun talk right, walk right, and don’t ast no questions.
Anyway, a lotta these old goat-pokers want me to use words nice people uses and would want to read—to other fukkin nice people I guess—but my question is what do nice people say when they want to call somebody a muthafukka or a coksukka, or even just a plain old sumbich?
I sure as hell don’t know. I ain’t growed up around no nice people—I try not to hang around with none, and if there are any out there somewhere, they can kiss my four-wheeler. Fuk them sumbiches. They ain’t as nice as they think they are nohow.
Oh, I know them planters is supposed to be nice people. Double-fuk them coksukkas, and the gotdam bankers too. Some of the lawyers is all right, though. I’ll give their ass a slide.
The long and the short of it is I like cussin’. And I like listening to it as much as I like doin’ it. Shoot, I wouldn mind having me one nem CDs with nothin’ but cussin’ on it—so I could stick it in the stereo and play it, and I’d just set there and relax.
Some nem sumbiches—out in California, I think—has CDs of birds fartin’, fish jumpin’, and leaves falling, or the sound of waves, like in the GuffaMexico, which I am about to get to, and they play em at night to go to sleep by. But I—me, personally—I’d be happy layin’ there in the dark with the window unit on just listening to some muthafukka cuss—real soft, of course, I guess you might even say gentle—in one nem Skyway-Hotel-Peabody, uptown radio-announcer voices?[2]
Or I can see puttin’ a cussin’ CD on my alarm clock thing: “Good morning, sumbich. It’s time to drag your mean-old worthless ass outta the bed, and go fix some gotdam eggs.”
There has been a lot of yip yap about me having had Shaw’s notebooks and, now, also about me having a good bit of the stuff Mad Owens wrote during the time he was pussywhipped by Money Scatters and afterwards when he tried to lose hissef in the GuffaMexico, way-off down there on the fukkin Mississippi Guffcoast, out at the ass-fukkin-end of just about ever’thin’, on Horn-gotdam-Island.
Bygod, next to Arkansas—and to the Yazoo Pass, in the Mississippi Delta, back in 1863—that place was as close to Hell itse’f as a sumbich like me would ever want to get.
People say, “Junior Ray ain’t got no business havin’ nothin’ to do with litter-ture. I just say fukkum. I am a historian—and that’s what this book, right here, is about—so I don’t see why me havin’ that other crap around—like Mad’s poems and the book he wrote down there at Horn Island on the beach, in the fukkin sand[3]—is so unusual.
If a sumbich is a historian, that’s part of what it takes to be one. Besides that, in Mad’s case, he knew I would hold on to all the stuff he handed over to me and that I would not let nobody fuk with it unless he give me the word. And in this case he give the word to me and to McKinney, who has already introduced herself to you and who thinks as much of Mad Owens as I do.
McKinney Lake is my fa-fukkin-cilitator—or whatever you want to call it. The publisher decided we’d call her that because this book ain’t really an actual re-search interview like the first book was, with young Mr. Brainsong who wanted to find out about the Delta and get hold of Leland Shaw’s notebooks. He didn’t want to do it no more, so McKinney agreed to help me while I talk the book. For one thing she’s from here and knows damn near as much as I do about the place. Plus I’ve knowed her since we was both pretty young and went to Mhoon County Consolidated. If all women was like McKinney, there wouldn be no problems in the fukkin world. Plus, people would think a whole lot better of women in general. You’ll see what I mean directly.
Anyway, I got all of Mad’s litter-ture in the closet under the stairs wrapped up in my waders, right where I kept Leland Shaw’s notebooks. I don’t wear the waders no more, cause I don’t go walkin’ out th’oo the sloughs, like I used to, to hunt ducks. If I want a duck, I know a dozen muthafukkas that’d be glad to get rid of some they’ve got, which they shot mostly in Arkansas, just so they could make more room in their freezer for other things, like okra . . . and their special chili, which nine times out of ten is made with squirrels and raccoons.
Wouldn nothin’ surprise your ass down here—they was a nigga one time who made hot-tamales, like you’ll find in all ’eez Delta towns, and, Oh Hell-o Bill, people couldn stop talkin’ about how dee-fukkin-licious them hot-tamales was. Well, the sumbich was makin’ em outta mink meat.
He was trappin’ the mink, like a lotta sumbiches did in those days, right on the west edge of town all down along the Sugar Ditch and selling the hides to old Fess Bright who’d ride the train to Meffis and sell em to a dealer on South Main. Fess was white of course.
I found it all out one time when I knocked on the hot-tamale nigga’s door to ast him if he knew who kilt another nigga the week before in the alley behind the Palace Thee-ater. And that’s when I saw what he was usin’ and knew what it was cause I seen the skins and the heads as well.
I never said one word about it. And I wuddn gon’ fuk up the deal he had goin’ with Fess. It coulda gotten complicated. He gimme the name of the sumbich that stabbed Bob Irwin’s top tractor driver, and I figured me not sayin’ nothin’ about him usin’ mink meat from the side of what was at the time the town’s sewage ditch was one way he and I could continue to have a workin’ relationship, which, as you know, in law enforcement, is real fukkin important. Plus, I had free hot-tamales anytime I wanted em.
Speakin’ of cookin’, after that first book that I done with young Mr. Brainsong II, it wuddn long before I noticed that books that has recipes in em do pretty well because women seem to go for em. So I decided to th’ow in two or three of my all-time personal favorites,[4] just in case. I had McKinney put the first one of em at the end of this chapter.
But now, back to the ducks. Fuk wadin’ around in a swamp waitin’ for those little skimmers to decide to fly over on their way to the South Pole or wherever it is nature tells em to go—plus I don’t think very many of em has flew over Mhoon County since the day Voyd pulled out a thing he ordered from a catalog, put it in his mouth, and said he was gon’ show me his “feeding call.”
Whatever that little sumbich told them ducks they was gon’ have for breakfast must have changed their mind forever about settin’ their formerly unsuspectin’ duck-butts down in Mhoon County. Well, that and the fact it’s been so hot and dry.
I used to get a kick out of watchin’ nem good-tastin’ little gliders come into the slough on a cold-ass morning, just at first light, when the water was froze over. They couldn tell it was solid, so when they landed on the ice, they’d go “Whump” and skid a few feet. I promise you those little “scofers” actually looked surprised, if you can imagine what a surprised duck might look like when the sumbich discovers things ain’t what they was quacked-up to be. That’s a joke, sumbich. But the ducks slidin’ in like that wuddn. They really did it.
Even though they ain’t none much no more around St. Leo, ducks is still serious business down here. People have the impression they’s all these rich-ass doctors out there somewhere—mostly in a lot of landowners’ dreams—and