Buddy's Blues
 by Kathy Barbour

I was visiting some longtime friends, rabid readers both, in Florida in the spring of 1997. Over beer and chips and salsa, I said, "So what's good to read? I've finished the book I brought. What have you got that I'd like?" They looked at each other, doing that mind-reader thing they do, and their eyes suddenly lit up like Swami Don's crystal ball. Either he said or she said, "Lewis Nordan!" One -- or the other -- of them padded off to fetch Wolf Whistle. I wolfed it down, chewing even Nordan's least characters -- Peter and Jeeter Skeeter, Dr. Dust, Mr. Shanker from the drug store -- chewing them so fine they entered my bloodstream directly. I was so full of Nordan, I became obnoxious to my friends, unable to stop quoting even as we said our goodbyes in the airport. I tweaked her nose as though she were the "hellhound" blind Pap Mecklin fed cheese to, saying, "That hellhound's snout felt a lot like a rat." I hugged him and said, "Mister, you smell like bird dooky." I hope I also managed to say "Thank you," but I couldn't swear to it.

When I got back home, I was ravenous for more Nordan. I bought every book I could find, reading indiscriminately, caring nothing for publication chronology. And I was never, NEVER disappointed, although Wolf Whistle remains my favorite, by a snout. All of Nordan's stories are, in one way or another, about loss, and how we go on. Lost innocence, lost parents, lost romance, lost illusions, lost hope, lost geographies ... How we go on once we discover "We are all alone in the world," the refrain all Nordan's chorus members cry, echoed by the swamps, the birds, the bluesmen. When we're first bruised by racism, when we're first blinded by lust, when we're first bloodied by violence, when we're first gutted and emptied out by death, these are Nordan's subjects in the short stories and the novels, populated by freaks, punctuated by laughter, because that's the great joke we're all in on: life makes freaks of us every one. So start anywhere. Or let me get you started with Wolf Whistle.

"Hole up a minute, spotey-otey, what's going on here?"

On an early September morning in 1955 in Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, the men gathered in Red's Goodlookin Bar and Gro. are subjected to two outrages. A woman with long, blond hair, dressed only in a trench coat and a pair of bedroom slippers, leaves her Cadillac running while she comes in looking to buy not Kotex, but tampons! "The truth was out about Sally Anne Montberclair: she was modern." She had the look on her face of "a woman who had just paid hard cash for tampons ... and who meant to use them, as advertised." As the men shift nervously among the black bananas and half-rotted peaches, the second outrage occurs. Bobo, a young black sport ("spote") visiting from Chicago, comes in to purchase two cents' worth of Bazooka bubble gum, sees Lady Montberclair, says "Hubba-hubba," then wolf whistles under his breath real low. And so the plot of Lewis Nordan's Wolf Whistle is set in motion.

On another steamy Delta morning in 1955 in Money, Mississippi -- just down the road from Itta Bena, where Lewis "Buddy" Nordan was a teenager going about his small-town business -- Emmett Till's savaged, bloated corpse was fished up. And that's when the black thing entered Nordan's blood, not to come bubbling up 'til 38 years later in his fourth book, and then not just in a spew of outrage, but in a manic froth of hilarity. We call this black humor.

Make no mistake. Nordan is repulsed by the white shit of unfathomable racial cruelty: "All that anger, all that white hatred, rage, a still, sweating, stinking, brooding, engorged buildingful of it, absences large enough, solid enough, to build furniture upon." But he understands that the depth of human dredging for evil is ultimately absurd, beyond logic, below words, just as the human grope towards love is beautiful -- sad, limitless, beyond logic, above words. We greet unspeakable grief as we do overwhelming joy: cartoon mouths wide O's spilling sounds, eyes squinched X's leaking water drops. Nordan greets the inexpressible with metaphor: Fire. Music. Water. Birds. White shit. And a dog dragging a bag full of harmonicas.

Fire

Across town from Red's Goodlookin Bar and Gro. where Cyrus "Runt" Conroy, Gilbert Mecklin and his blind daddy Pap, Solon Gregg, and some astounded rafter-sitting pigeons are still gaping over Sally Anne's tampons and Bobo's wolf whistle, Alice Conroy readies her fourth-grade students for a field trip to visit their absent schoolmate, Glenn Gregg. He's home, sick:

He was unrecognizable as himself, or even as a child. His scars were like taut ropes. His hair was gone, everything. His eyes were wide open because the lids had been burned away. His teeth were white and prominent as a skeleton, because he had no lips.

Fire Sure Is Hot

Glenn Gregg had doused his thieving, murdering, queer-rolling, wife-beating, white-trash father, Solon Gregg, with gasoline, meaning to burn him to death, but instead had set himself on fire. He'd lain in agony, near death for months. But his fourth-grade chums were supportive. They'd sent him get-well cards, which Mrs.Gregg had kindly pinned to his bedroom wall. For example, one child had

cut from different colors of construction paper flamelike shapes of red and yellow and orange and black. Behind the flames Glenn's smiling face was visible. The caption said "'I'm fine,' said Glenn Gregg, 'but boy this fire sure is hot!'"

Music

Mrs. Gregg -- Solon's wife, Glenn's mother -- had been unable to speak to Alice on the phone to grant her permission to bring Glenn's little mates to visit him. Instead she'd sent a note. Mrs.Gregg had been so taunted, so belittled, so mocked, so abused by her husband that one day she realized she was having difficulty speaking. At first she began to speak in clichés, as though language had gone dead in her mouth and she seemed to have no thoughts of her own. Then her clichés miscegenated: "Don't cross your bridges before they hatch" and "A bird in the hand gathers no moss." Soon she could barely stammer. Yet when Glenn's class visited, Mrs. Gregg seemed miraculously to regain her powers of speech -- through music.

Mrs. Gregg said, "Glenn poured gasoline, Glenn poured gasoline, right on his daddy's bed; he was trying to burn up his daddy, when he burned up hisself instead." Now Alice understood. By thinking of the tune "Here Comes Santa Claus" Mrs. Gregg could speak without stammering. With that tune in her head, she could say anything. Santa Claus had broken her chains and set her free.

Music, Meet Fire. Hot Licks!

After Solon Gregg's son tried to kill him, Solon had high-tailed it to New Orleans for awhile, robbing and rolling, even murdering weaker people to make his living. His first day back in Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, after he has yukked it up with the boys in Red's Goodlookin Bar and Gro. and hatched the plan to murder Bobo for his young, black, smart mouth, Solon finally makes it to his house to reunite with his family. He wonders what kind of reception he will receive. He thinks about that old song, "If I knew you were coming I'd have baked a cake." He's heard by now, though, from several sources that his own boy had been burned in the fire meant for him -- and yet he hasn't seen the reality of "burned." When he does stand by his son's bed with his wife and other children, taking in the scars, the lidless eyes, he's speechless ... and so he reaches over and picks up his old guitar. Mrs. Gregg grabs her zinc washboard. Wanda, the oldest daughter, retrieves her one-string bass -- a strand of piano wire stretched on a broomstick stuck through a washtub. The family that plays together stays together. Then, babies looking on, the Greggs launch into "Bo Peep," a blues song composed by a local black man named Blue John Jackson, one of the porch sitters outside Red's Goodlookin Bar and Gro. on the day Bobo had gone inside to buy bubblegum and blow his two-note music at a white woman, innocently whistling up his own death. "Bo Peep. Done lost her sheep. Done lost her sheep. ..."

Has Lewis Nordan done lost his mind, forcing us to laugh out loud, then cover our mouths in horror at these improbable scenes? How better to convey lost innocence than by bringing kindly-intentioned children who have no notion of what fire-on-flesh really does to a small human body -- let alone what toll the fire of ancient hatred takes on families, towns, entire geographies -- to gather around the air-sucking roast of Glenn Gregg, their gay greeting cards mocking from the wall? How else to convey unspeakable brutality than by the not-speech of music, hopeful songs about cakes and Santy Claus and fluffy white sheep that prove how far our rosiest wishes have plummeted into hell-fire? How many of us still believe happy darkies were always a-laughin' and a-singin' 'cause they were stretchin' they mouths around the joy of life?

Lewis Nordan's compassion has stretched so far he's black, and he's a woman, and he's all his characters, even the most despicable redneck. The reason evil is absurd, he suggests, is because we're all one person, so that if you're the arrow shooter, you're also the arrow catcher. Just ask that arrow-catchin' fool up on the cross, say, "Jesus, Body of Mankind, what's communion all about anyway with them little croutons and that Welch's grape-ade? If I eat pieces of you, do I be you?"

A hundred-year-old white-trash voodoo woman wearing a swastika hollers at Alice, "Lard Jesus was a white child!" -- white like Crisco for haircream or ... or white like bird shit.

Bird Dooky

The pigeons roosting in the rafters at Red's Goodlookin, made extremely nervous by a white woman's and a black youth's breach of good ol' boy etiquette, shat. Some must have landed in Runt Conroy's hair because later that day, as he leaves the poor white section of Arrow Catcher, Balance Due, and heads into the black section, the Belgian Congo -- along Esequeena Street, which divides/connects the two and is presided over by talking vultures -- looking for Bobo to kind of warn him trouble's brewing, a little black girl sniffs at him, then sassily says, "You smell like bird dooky, all the way up on the porch." He responds, "I do? You can smell me ... ?" And so a metaphor is born. The damning white splat of bird-do becomes a motif in the novel, a moral index, Old Testament retribution.

Bird Do Tell

Runt Conroy is not an evil man. He's small. He's a dreamer. He's a drunk. His wife, Fortunata, has run off and left him to care for their kids. Alice, his schoolteacher niece, helps him. But he's experiencing a personal nadir. Bobo's grisly murder will leave him standing at the crossroads. (This is, after all, Robert Johnson country, and blues music runs like a film score behind the novel's action.) Runt has a big African parrot who says nothing, despite people's various attempts to coach him ("Pussy is good!" for example); instead, he makes a sound like a cash register. Follow this parrot throughout the novel to the trial of Bobo's white murderers where the only justice doled out is, um, execrable.

Alice in Wonderland

Alice, though, is the moral apex of Nordan's lowland Delta. She's a seer in addition to being a teacher. Never mind that her lessons will probably leave her fourth-grade charges scarred for life. Besides visiting Glenn Gregg's monstrous mummy bedside, her field trips lead her young disciples to boat through shit on a sewage reservoir and to witness an embalming at the Prince of Darkness funeral parlor (although that excursion had to be canceled at the last minute). Their last outing takes them to the black gallery above the white-filled courthouse floor where Bobo's murderers are on trial -- To Kill a Mockingbird, Redux. Alice is fit to be the children's guide because her compassion stretches to bridge colors and continents. Over the angry sea of white faces, Alice -- the children parroting her -- waves love to the solitary, terrified black man, Bobo's uncle, testifying on the witness stand below:

we are here, we are waving our arms as our teacher waves hers, we are saying in loud voices that we are colored people when we know we are not . . . we are suffering damage from this field trip into the heart of darkness and from our teacher that we may never recover from and we don't care because we love her ... and for reasons obscure we love you, too, old colored man.

Music, Meet Water

As the novel opens at the end of the steamy Delta summer, the first raindrops fall, ping-ping. The black porch-sitting bluesmen pluck their first notes, twang-twang. The air thickens with the plot as forces collide. The heat, the hate need an outlet, an expression, a transformation. Outside Alice's schoolroom window, "the rain was jungle drums. In the trees it was incantations in foreign tongues." As Alice walks home in her clear-plastic raincoat, raindrops collect "like fat, puffed-out, transparent little crystal sparrows on a limb." She looks into one raindrop and it functions like a miniature crystal ball, showing her a child in a river. She thinks it's a dream. It's not. It's Bobo's death Alice is foreseeing. Flash ahead to the scene of Bobo's actual murder, the spillway over a swamp. It's night. The rain has crescendoed. "The water poured over the spillway like music." Of the gunshots that kill him, one bullet knocks out Bobo's eye, which dangles, another crystal ball. As it hangs

upon the child's moon-dark cheek in the insistent rain, the dead boy saw the world as if his seeing were accompanied by an eternal music. ... In this music the demon eye saw what Bobo could not see in life, transformations, angels and devils, worlds invisible to him before death.

The demon eye sees past and future as Bobo's rotting body becomes the music of the swamp, rising. At novel's end, Alice and Sally Anne happen to run into each other in Swami Don's Elegant Junk shop. Touring the aisles, they come to a crystal ball. Here they stop. Here I stop.

Fire. Music. Water. Birds. White shit. And don't forget the dog dragging a bag full of harmonicas.

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Wolf Whistle by Lewis Nordan

[ paper | cloth ]

Dr. Kathy Barbour is an adjunct professor of English at the University of Tampa.

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