Junior Ray. John Pritchard
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of crap,” he makes it quite clear he has no intention of giving up his ownership of Shaw’s work. And so I became acquainted with a genuine enigma, Junior Ray Loveblood, and it was from him, finally, that I decided to learn as much as I could, from his rather unrestrained perspective, about the Delta.
On the face of it, choosing Junior Ray as an informant might have seemed an odd option for a serious scholar, such as I, in the field of Anthropological Philology; yet, I have observed that among all the rigorous disciplines, flexibility is a virtue, and, most assuredly, opportunity is its reward. As I saw it, I stood to benefit doubly by having access to Shaw’s “Notes” as well as—how shall I put it . . . also to Shaw’s antithesis, Junior Ray Loveblood. In that way, I believed I might obtain a most unusual three-dimensional grasp of the region.
It is of the utmost importance that I communicate to you, the reader, that my interest in Shaw’s “Notes,” both as literature and as record, was actually secondary to my curiosity about the place; for it was the place, I felt, that had made Shaw, and from that point of view, it seemed to follow that it was in fact the place that had really produced the “Notes.” Suddenly I understood. In the single powerful and didactic moment of an instinctual epiphany, I saw that the place had two voices. One was that of Shaw. The other was Junior Ray’s. The situation was unique, and I embraced it.
Junior Ray was not easy to interview. At first he didn’t want to do it, but after we began, as time went on, he seemed to enjoy the attention, so I did not rein him in, as one or two others suggested I should do for sake of propriety.
Instead I sat quietly and took down all he had to tell me about Leland Shaw and about that time and place. I recorded as accurately as I could all he said, precisely the way he said it. The text that follows consists of Junior Ray’s narrative interspersed with selected excerpts from Shaw’s “Notes,” so that the reader can indeed hear the two voices, those of Junior Ray and Leland Shaw, as separate realities of a single illusion: that mythical place Mississippians know as The Delta.
— Owen G. Brainsong II
1
Me — Leland Shaw — Voyd — Temptation Jones — Sunflower’s Underpants
Some people might say there ain’t much to me, but that’s a gotdamn lie. There’s just as much to me as it is to any other sumbich I know. Yeah, maybe I wouldn’t be here doing what I’m doing if I’da handled a few things different, way back yonder, but I can’t change none of that now.
I guess I started head’n down the wrong road about the time that crazy-ass sumbich Leland Shaw run off from the “Rest Wing” of the county hospital and hid out in old Miss Helena Ferry’s silo for about three months in the winter of nineteen fifty-nine. I wanted to kill him then, and, if he was alive today—and I guess he might be—I’d want to kill him now, and I do. Hell, being able to kill him and get away with it was the whole point of the thing. I can’t explain it. It’s just something about him I hate, and, quite frankly, if you want to know the truth, I really kinda enjoy the feeling, even though it didn’t start out in that fashion: I didn’t hate him at first. In fact, in the beginning I didn’t have no feeling about him one way or the other. He was just what you might call convenient, a sumbich I could shoot and have it looked on as a public service. And that particular set of circumstances would have allowed me to do what I had always wanted to do, namely, shoot the shit out of somebody. But, as time went by, things changed, or at least the way I felt about him did, so that I ended up hating him and couldn’t really say why. I just did, and then it seemed like I ought to have been hating his ass all along only I hadn’t known to do it. Well, as I always say, live and fukkin learn.
Though, personally, if I couldn’t no longer get a rush out of hating the memory of Leland Shaw—and one or two others connected with him—like that high-yellow bitch that come back down here from Chicago that time—I wouldn’t see no sense in living.
I know you probably think I’m an asshole, and maybe I am, but I don’t give a damn. I didn’t then, and I don’t now. And if I ever see one of them coksukkin Mohammedan muthafukkas again, or whatever they call theysefs, I’mo do him like my daddy and them done his ancestors back in Clay City, over in the hills, when I was a little fukka. They had a sign up across’t the main street there that said, “nigga, don’t let the sun set on your black ass in clay city.” By god them ol’ boys meant it, and that’s why Clay City is where it is today.
They all say the Delta’s different, and it is, too. When I got here forty-odd years ago, the Delta wuddn nothin like where I come from. But, hell, I hear this little old Delta town right here was just as bad in some ways as Clay City, like the time back around 1910 when that northern girl’s father got off the train and saw two bucks hangin’ from the telegraph poles and then come to find out they was three more of ’em hangin’ off that big old scalybark set’n there beside Charlie Hayes’s driveway; but, of course, it wuddn nothin’ there then but the tree and a little bit of woods. Later on, the story was that whoever did the hangin’ was after a white fellow, too, but he got away, natcherly. And It wuddn no nightklux what done it—them planters here in the county wouldna put up with that—it was just a buncha town folks that went out and got them niggas and hanged ’em. I sure don’t know what for, and they probably wuddn too sure about it neither. You know how it is when things get started. But Christ almighty, it wuddn no big thing back in them times. Hell, you’re just talkin’ about four or five dead niggas. ’Course, I hear some of them big planters didn’t see it thataway. You can understand it when you realize how important niggas was to them in those days. Hell, they couldn’t get along unless they had a whole house full of ’em. Then, too, them planters liked to be the ones who controlled things, and a lotta times, so I hear, they and some of the merchants in the town didn’t always see eye to eye—like when the klan wanted to come in and some of the merchants wanted to let ’em. Them planters put a stop to that real quick. Well, I mean, they owned the land and near ’bout everybody on it, so why shouldn’t they be the ones to run the show? And it wuddn all bad neither. But that was a another time, and just like anything else, it had its pluses and minuses.
Anyhow, I am no worse than most and not as bad as some, though, Lord knows, I’ve tried. I ain’t afraid to say what I think, and if some bigshot sumbich don’t like it, fukkim.
I said a minute ago “if Leland Shaw was alive.” The fact is, he might be. We never caught him, but I did see him, and the last time—or so I will always believe—was in the car with them Mohammedans later that day when the whole thing suddenly come to an end over at Miss Helena Ferry’s house. I’ll have to get into that directly and, also, that business about the submarine and us meetin’ up with them Boy Sprouts out behind the levee. There was a-lots of things I didn’t understand and, even now, can’t make much sense out of. But it was a wild time, I’ll say that. And me and my old buddy Voyd loved almost every minute of it.
Now, let me just say one thing—maybe two—right here. First, I don’t mind being interviewed and talking about what happened, but I want to get something straight on the front end: All this has got to be wrote the way I tell it.
And second, the other thing you wanted to know about was them “Notebooks.” I’ll get to them in a minute—
I don’t see much of Voyd no more, not since he had his bypass. And then, too, he got married—married Sunflower LeFlore and farmed for a number of years on her daddy’s place. I remember when I let him borrow my patrol car—I was a deputy sheriff at the time—so he and Sunflower could go out on a turnrow somewhere. She got drunk and pissed all over the front seat of the official vehicle and then passed out.
I could’ve gotten in trouble for that. But Sheriff Holston never did find out—or if he did, he never let on—and everything worked out okay. If anything had been said about it, I was just going to claim I forgot to put the window up and a cat got in the car. It really didn’t smell much like cat piss, but I figured it was close enough to satisfy the average person.
I was real young and didn’t think out what I was doing before