The Yazoo Blues. John Pritchard

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СКАЧАТЬ somehow, their pitiful-ass souls had a chance of goin’ somewhere besides Hell—which, frankly, compared with how they lived, woulda looked like a stroke of good luck and mighta seemed no worse than a day choppin’ cotton.

      It was the same with Elvis. He thought that house of his was a mansion. It ain’t. It’s just a house.

      Anyway, Reverend Flickett, the Piscob’l sumbich, felt like he wuddn gettin’ nowhere with the clientele. He’d tell em they better shape up, and they’d just set there and yawn. But then he seen the light, even if they didn’t. He was gon’ have to scare the shit out of em to get em to take his Piscob’l ass seriously, even though, somebody said, he didn’t really want none of them cootie-bit muthafukkas ever to decide to join up and become Piscob’ls. And the more he tried to do the right thing but, you might say, with the wrong objective in mind, the more confused that pitiful muthafukka become. Personally, I’ll lay money he meant well, but you know yoursef, whenever anybody says some sumbich “tried to do the right thing,” it normally means he was dumber’n shit and had fukked up real bad.

      The story come out bit by bit. He had begun to tell those transplanted hillbilly muthafukkas that the end of the gotdam world was comin’, and just to th’ow em into high gear, the sumbich put a date on it: December 22nd, 1964.

      So the coksukka kept on warnin’ em: “The world is goin’ to end—on December the twenty-second in this the year of Our Lord, nineteen hunnuhd and sixty-fukkin-four!” And then, the word was, even though the Reverend Flickett was a Piscob’l, he neverthe-fukkin-less tried his hand at shoutin’, and they say the sumbich would drill his beady eyes into them pekkawoods and holler, “Repent! You sorry sonzabitches!”

      People all said that for a Piscob’l, he was more like a Baptist. The Baptists, natchaly, said, “Bullshit,” that he wuddn no such a thing. Personally I don’t give a fishfuk. I’m just tellin’ you what happened and what I heard.

      Anyhow, apparently late—late—in the middle of the night, the one that was gonna come up the morning of December 22nd, 19 and 64—he got a coil of electrical wire, some blasting caps, and all the dynamite he had collected and hid away underneath the Piscob’l Church in St. Leo, and very syste-fukkin-matically made nine bundles of nine sticks each. He later told the doctor at the state insane asylum down at Whitfield he called em his “Triple Trinities.” After he stuck the blasting caps in em, he attached thirty-five to forty-foot wires. Then, in the dark, without no lights, he drove slowly down the gravel road, stoppin’ in front of each lillo shotgun, where he’d dismount and ever so tippy-toe cast one nem bundles of dynamite up underneath the house, leavin’ one end of the long wire next to the road—or off in the ditch beside it. And since the store was built on a slab—instead of up off the ground like the houses was—he couldn th’ow nothin’ under it, so he broke the glass in the front door and lobbed the package inside; after the blast there was gotdam baloney and potted meat and and vy-eena sausages and them real red, strung-together weenies all strowed out fifty fukkin yards in ever’ direction.

      Anyway, when he had done th’owed the dynamite inside the store, he drove back down the road and hooked all the wires from the bundles to one long-ass, main wire, one end of which, when he had drove off far enough, he looped around the negative pole on his car battery.

I don’t know if he waited a little bit and thought about it or what, 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.

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