AS I WALKED all the way home from the courthouse on that hot June day, I still had no idea what life-changing things were in store for me and my family. Not a hint, not a clue.
Our house was quiet and dark that afternoon when I arrived. I walked through the front parlor. No sign of Meg, Amelia, or Alice.
In the kitchen a peach pie was cooling on a table. Through the window I saw our cook, Mazie, sitting on the back stoop, shelling butter beans into a white enamelware pan.
“Has Meg gone out, Mazie?” I called.
“Yes, suh, Mr. Ben. And she took the littl’uns with her. Don’t know where. Miz Corbett, she was in some bad mood when she went. Her face all red like, you know how she gets.”
How she gets. My Meg, my sweet New England wife. So red in the face. You know how she gets. The gentlest girl at Radcliffe, the prettiest girl ever to come from Warwick, Rhode Island. Burning red in the face.
And she gets that way because of me, I couldn’t help thinking. Because of my failure, because of my repeated failure. Because of the shame I bring on our house with my endless “charity cases” for the poor and disenfranchised.
I walked to the parlor and lifted my banjo from its shelf. I’d been trying to learn to play ragtime tunes since I first heard the new music that had come sweeping up from the South late in the old century. It was music as noisy and fast as one of the new motorcars that were unsettling horses all over the country.
I sat on the piano bench and tried to force my clumsy fingers to find the first offbeat notes of that skittering melody. The music seemed to be in such a hurry, but something about it took me back to a place and a time much slower, and maybe better, than any in Washington, D.C. The bumpy syncopation reminded me of the sound I used to hear coming from tiny Negro churches out in the country, in the woods outside Eudora, Mississippi, where I was born and raised.
As a boy I’d walked past those churches a thousand times. I’d heard the clapping and the fervent amens. Now that had all gotten blended in with a fast-march tempo and the syncopated melody of the old work songs. Mix it all together, speed it up, and somehow, from that corner of the South, down around where Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas meet up, the music came out ragtime.
Whenever I heard that sound, whether issuing from a saloon on the wrong side of Capitol Hill or a shiny new phonograph in Dupont Circle, it sent me out of my Washington life and down the memory road to Mississippi.
And whenever I thought of Mississippi, I couldn’t help seeing my mother’s face.