The Yazoo Blues. John Pritchard
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because I don’t know when he got finished puttin’ everything together, but about the time the first feelark[4] farted or the first goose honked, Pastor Flickett, you might say, completed the circuit, and the world ended sho-nuff then and there for Slab Town.
I heard the boom way-ass up where I was in St. Leo, but I was so sleepy I didn’t pay it no mind. I thought it was a freight train pickin’ up cars off the side track.
Dundee Hamlin not only heard the boom, he seen the flash. The way he told it he’d been up all night wonderin’ what was goin’ to happen to his “way of life” if it was ever a nigga on the Ole Miss football team. I guess, if the sumbich had a mind left, which he don’t, he’d know now. He’s in a nursin’ home down in Clarksdale. I seen him about a year ago. He looked like a little piece of paper.
Anyway the thing rattled Dundee’s windows and shook his wife’s teacups around, so he phoned up Sheriff Holston, and you know the rest.
I know, though, to Dundee Hamlin, the loss of Slab Town wuddn nowhere near as bad as the possibility there’d ever be niggas on the Ole Miss football team.
Of course, they was thirty-three people kilt—eighteen of em children of one size or another—and seven dogs, plus a barrow hog that happened to be inside one of the houses so he wouldn get stole. It was a fukkin mess.
But I’ll say one thing about that Piscob’l preacher. You could go to the bank on what he might tell you. Plus, it’s a funny thing—after the story of all that come out in court, nobody at all, not even the kin of the Slab Town dead, wanted to put him in the gas chamber. Seemed like everybody just got to thinkin’ about other things, so they sent his ass off to the crazy house at Whitfield, and, unless he died, I guess he’s there to this very fukkin day, standin’ in the grass with his eyes on Heaven and his arms helt up like he’s gon’ catch something. Maybe he will.
And in all of it, didn’t nobody even once think the niggas had done it even though there was one family of niggas just a little bit north of what was the store, livin’ in a dogtrot that didn’t get blowed up, on a turnrow runnin’ alongside a little bye-oh.[5] Didn’t nobody—nobody at all—think niggas had kilt all them unfortunate muthafukkas. And I can see why, too. A nigga wouldn do something like that. The thing about niggas is, they may be niggas, but they ain’t crazy like white people. You can pretty much always trust a nigga not never to do something like blow up a row of houses on a gravel road, but you can’t ever be sure about a white man, and if you’ve got one that believes in virgin births, risin’ from the dead, and God punishin’ two nekkid people for wantn an education, you need to watch his ass ever’ minute of the day.
Another thing about niggas is them sumbiches’ll agree with you all fukkin day long, with a gotdam endless-ass string of sho-dos, awhn-haws, and ay-mens, and then not go out and do a thing about none of it. In one way, I guess, them sumbiches have become experts on how to manage a white man, not that you’re gon’ find a whole lot of white men who’ll agree with that, but it’s still the gospel fukkin truth.
Niggas. I’ve tried to figure it out, but so far I ain’t come up with nothin’. What is it, I ast myse’f, that makes them so different? And no matter how hard I try to think it out I don’t never get nowhere at all.
For instance, I can’t name nothin’ they do that we don’t. They knock up their girl friends, we knock up ours. They shoot craps and kill each other, and we do, too. When we was little, we played baseball, and so did them sumbiches. Hell, we played it together. I can’t think of one thing they do or did that we don’t do or didn’t—except maybe two things, and one is that they are better at singin’ and don’t look like they’ve been dead a week when they do it, like we do, and the other thing is, and I can vouch for this, they didn’t fuk as many barnyard animals as we did. Or possibly do.
Now, them white-ass Baptist muthafukkas’ll talk to you all day long about how God is love and that’s why he kilt Jesus, just to show how much He loves ever’ body, and them whites’ll get all misty-eyed about bein’ saved and how they’re filled with the joy of the Holy Spirit and all—and also how it’s better to give than to take-the-money-and-run kin’a shit, and after they’re thoo, you’ll find out them sumbiches hate ever’ thin’ that walks and don’t talk like them.
Before the truth had got out, Miss Ellen Fremedon and her brother Granville swore it was the Communists that blowed up Slab Town. So did the president of the Rotary Club, Lofty Thawtts, who, if you want to know the truth, had been hipped on that subject ever since I could remember and who was the one way back yonder that got the high school to make us all sign a gotdam loyalty oath.
I recall I swore I hadn’t never been a member of the W.E.B. Du Bois Boys Club. I was damn sure of that. And I still don’t know what the fuk it was.
Miss Ellen Fremedon, though, and her brother Granville was definitely a couple’a cases. They was twins, and they lived together down south of Clayton. And here’s the funny thing: Granville was a little bitty fukka, skinny as a willow switch, but he could eat like a fukkin Massey-Harris combine gobblin’ up a bean field.
People talked all the time about how Miss Ellen would fix him whole chickens and whole pies and whole cakes, and Granville would down them muthafukkas like they was peanuts; yet, he never gained a pound. Doctor Austin once said Granville was an “anomaly.” I never knew what Doc meant by that, but Granville was a white man, and I don’t think there was no foreigners in the family.
It was something to see that skinny sumbich eat. I seen him scarf down a en-tire turkey once—plus all the dressing and the candied yams and a whole bunch of mince-meat pies, all of which was enough, somebody said—and I believe it—to feed two Ole Miss guards and a tackle.
As far as I know he didn’t even sneak a poot after that. But later, maybe ten years later, Miss Ellen’s housemaid found him dead, settin’ at the dinner table with his arms down to his side and a whole sirloin steak hangin’ out of his mouth just like he’d swallowed all of a beaver except for the tail. He had apparently picked the thing up in both hands, chomped down on one end of it, and blowed a blood vessel at the same time. If that is the case, I hate to think of what’s gon’ happen to me.
Anyhow, at first there was some talk about the communists and how none of em believed in God and such. Then, wouldn you know it, when it come out a preacher done it, didn’t nobody want to believe that. And it took a while for that to take, so to speak.
But when it did, most people was certain it had to be the Piscob’l fellow because, unlike the rest of the churches in St. Leo that crowded in so many fukkin people of a Sunday that it just about butt-sprung the walls, them Piscob’ls only had about twenty-five sumbiches who went to their church, which was just a lillo thing settin’ back up under some white oaks on a side street in the middle of town.
Plus, as everybody said, too, them Piscob’ls drunk real wine when they had their “Lord’s Supper,” unlike the fukkin Cath’lics which I hear drinks blood with theirs. It’s no wonder those few pope-ass sumbiches didn’t even have a church in all of Mhoon County and had to go outta town ever’ Sunday if they wanted to endure settin’ in one. They looked Cath’lic, too, if you know what I mean.
Well, that’s the kind of stuff you deal with in law enforcement. I just wish there was more of it.
A minute ago I mentioned old Lofty Thawtts. Lofty was one of these men that always seemed like one thing but was really not like anything you could ever imagine. For instance, there he was, back yonder, the president of the St. Leo Rotary Club, a position obviously in which a sumbich is supposed to have a lot of fukkin sense. But hang on, Sloopy. Lofty had his house and his land and his fukkin car and ever’thin’ else insured by a company that called itself a Christian insurance company—The Resurrection Insurance Group, I think it was. Anyhow, years and years later, it come out that not a crow-fartin’ thing he ever put in a claim for was honored because the Group told him, no matter what he filed for—theft of his pickup, a grease fire in his kitchen,