BACK TO THE BURYING GROUND
(1962)
Merrell’s taste in women improved. His new squeeze, Sarah, had real class. She was the new schoolmarm in an old cowboy movie, a fair-skinned brunette with a moist glow around her. As karmic synchronicity would have it, she was from Wortham, Texas, where Blind Lemon was buried. She said her old family maid talked about Lemon all the time. She agreed to take me to meet the old woman.
This was it! I was going to get direct insight into the legendary figure about whom so little was known. Sarah Moody would be my portal to the past. One weekend in early spring we organized a safari. Sarah and Tommy Rodman rode with me to Austin, where we picked up Jimmy Baird. We were armed with a camera, tape recorder, 8mm camera, and Sam Charters’s The Country Blues, the book in which I had learned of Blind Lemon and the Negro graveyard in Wortham.
The old woman was short and round. She sat in a rocker, looking out the window of her shotgun shack across the railroad tracks from what one could call “downtown Wortham.” She was surprised to see “Miss Sarah.” They oohed and aahed over each other with real affection. Sarah told her why we had come. “Blind Lemon?” the old woman said, “I was raised up with Blind Lemon. He was a child and I was a child. I was raised up with him. I can tell you all ’bout Blind Lemon.” I showed her the picture in the Charters book. “That’s Lemon. That’s Blind Lemon! Like he was coming in the door. He was a child and I was a child. I was raised up with him. That’s Blind Lemon.”
We packed up the tape recorder and left the old woman muttering, “I can tell you all ’bout Blind Lemon.” She did not do so. I started to realize that’s all there was going to be. Baird was disgruntled, and grumbled as we got back in the car. Sarah was apologetic. Rodman was confused. I was disappointed but starting to get the picture. There was no doorway to the past. No Rosetta Stone to unlock the blues’ secrets.
I drove to the old Negro cemetery where we had seen the neglected grave the year before. Things were different. Small tin markers with cardboard name plates were stuck in the hard Texas dirt over Lemon and his mother’s graves. At the head of the weed-covered barren space that held all that was left of Blind Lemon was an old glass pitcher with two brooms sticking out of it. Inside the glass pitcher was a handwritten letter on what looked like a roll of adding machine tape. It told a rambling story of some pilgrim who was to meet with friends at the graveside. The letter was vague. The broom’s symbolism was obvious, “See that my grave is kept clean,” he had once sung into the darkness.
When I looked up from the strange letter I saw a group of elderly black folks walking toward us over dead grass and sunken graves. The leader wore a black suit and a ribbon banner across his chest announcing he was a minister. Sure enough, it was the pastor and the deacons from the church next to the graveyard. They wanted to know what we were doing. Sarah and Baird did the talking, being the most respectable looking. The preacher recognized Sarah’s family name and warmed up right away. “We had some folks come looking for that same grave a few weeks back,” he said. “One of ’em wasn’t right in the head. They lef’ that ol’ stuff up by the grave. Police took that one boy off and locked him up. They got him in the hospital now. He’s not right. I can see you folks is all right and not up to nothin’. You say you is from the university?”
“Yes sir. We’re doing research on Blind Lemon Jefferson and regional music from the twenties and thirties.”
“You folks needs to go see Trappy,” the preacher said, receiving a nod of approval from the deacons standing behind him. “Old Trappy. He used to lead Blind Lemon around when he went to Dallas to make them records. Lemon taught him to play second guitar with him.”
He gave Sarah directions to find the old man. She appeared to know what he was talking about. It seemed like we wandered all over central Texas before we found the little country store.
Trappy wore a white dress shirt and black suspenders. He sat in the shade behind a country store/gas station that had seen better days. Several old men sat nearby playing a silent game of checkers. They didn’t look up.
“Can I help you folks?”
Baird explained (he was getting good at it). “We are students from the university doing research and were told that you had played with Blind Lemon.”
Trappy was more forthcoming than the old woman. He had been Blind Lemon’s lead boy and led the blind musician out of the Texas flatlands and up the old highway to Dallas. Lemon taught him to play second guitar. He had not gone on Lemon’s fatal trip to Chicago. “I’da took better care of him, watched out, ya know? He’d get drunked up and pass out on the street. Wasn’t so bad down home but up there in Chicago he just froze up and died.”
I asked Trappy if he still played guitar.
“Lightnin’ struck my cabin one night in a storm, knocked down my guitar from where it was hangin’ on the wall. My wife took it as a sign from God and worried me ’til I gave it up.”
I pulled my guitar out of the back of the car and strummed it awhile. “Why don’t you see what you can remember?” I offered him the old Stella. He chuckled with a deep rattle in his chest, and took the instrument from me. “Lemme see can I chord that thing.” His old fingers were clumsy on the steel strings reaching for an E chord. He plunked around for a while but seemed to get nowhere, “Nawsuh, I done forgot. It done been too long. You play somethin’ for me.”
The guitar felt funny in my hands, like a stranger rather than an old friend. I tried to play a line of “Black Snake Moan.” He grinned toothlessly. “That’s fine,” he said.
As I drove us back to Austin and then Waco, I thought about the experience with the old woman and Trappy. I thought about the black minister and his deacons patrolling the graveyard, protecting it from “crazy white strangers” prying into their past. We were invading a private culture where we had no place. As badly as I wanted to learn the secrets of Blind Lemon, I did not want to trespass on this private history, this society that had produced music I loved.
The next day was Sunday. I went out to the lake and listened to Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar on the car radio as the sun sank in the west. When I got back to the dorm I tried in vain to crack a book. The old woman and Trappy were still in my mind. I could see Lemon being led by Trappy-the-child as they walked the streets of Wortham nearly half a century before. What was it in the eternal darkness of his world that had caused him to sing out? He was hell with the ladies, stumbling onto them to cop a quick feel. Poor blind boy, he wrestled, blind as a bat, in a traveling snake oil medicine show carnival. His songs were nasty, salacious, thinly veiled double entendre sexual humor, save for the one simple request, “See that my grave is kept clean.”
Down the hall a brave soul played his record player. Devil music on the Sabbath. It was a far cry from Blind Lemon and yet part of the same American musical experiment in which the races reached for each other. The record’s B side was a medley of songs my band had played two years ago in Memphis. I had seen an ad in the Dallas newspaper for the Mar-Keys playing at the Cellar. I had missed the boat. The gypsy’s warning had come too late.