I spent the rest of the film watching the upper-righthand corner of the screen: there, my father once told me, the white circles appear that signal the projectionist it’s time to switch reels. Swirling, pale, they looked like ripples in a river. The student running the show was a klutz. He panicked. Twice, the film broke. We had a lot of delays. Toward the end, the transitions smoothed out, a bittersweet comfort, though everyone around me seemed nervous, and the movie itself was sad.
Burying the Blues
At two o’clock, Hugh found Spider Lammamoor on the porch of his house in the projects over on Dowling Street. Spider wore a green cotton shirt, unbuttoned to the waist, jeans with no belt, and no shoes. His skin, scarred, etched with wrinkles, was the deep dark color of balsam.
His slender fingers gripped a malt liquor can. Now and then he brought it slowly to his lips. “Been doin’ me some thinkin’,” he said. Hugh locked his Chevy Nova by the curb, then walked to the jagged porch. “Takes a long sit.” Spider lifted the can. “And half a dozen quarts of this-here oil.”
“You’re way ahead of me,” Hugh said, setting down a paper sack from which he pulled a six-pack of Colt 45s. “I brought these for you, but — ”
“Good. They’ll find a use.” Spider reached inside his shirt and scratched his belly, just below the stark outline of his ribs. Hugh brushed a fly from his face. Cicadas made a crazy racket in the trees.
“Thinking about what?” Hugh said.
“This weekend.”
“You ready?”
Spider had been Houston’s finest blues drummer, but two years ago he’d simply quit. Hugh had talked him into performing again with a group of young musicians at the city’s annual Juneteenth Celebration.
“I’m ready, but the world’s changed, man.”
“How? What’s eating you?”
“Listen. Listen.” Still clutching the beer can in his hand, Spider pointed past the trees, whose fingered leaves curled in the heat, toward a long series of identical row houses behind them. Oak shadows waved across their bricks, a jigsaw of rich and shifting light. On one of the walls, someone had painted muscular black arms, chained at the wrists.
Hugh heard children laughing, cars backfiring and chugging on the Loop, just north of here. He shrugged. He wondered how many malt liquors Spider had downed already.
Then Spider nudged his shoulder. “There it is,” he said. “Hear it?”
A muffled throb from somewhere in the houses. Then an angry, rhythmic voice. “The boom box?”
“Yeah. Rappin’ shit. Kids today, man, they pissed off and mean. Listen to that wham wham wham all the time ’stead of the old tunes. Ain’t no place for me here. Not no more.”
“That’s not true,” Hugh said.
“My day has come and gone.”
“You wait and see this weekend. More people than ever love the blues.” He offered Spider a cigarette. Hugh didn’t smoke but he always carted a carton of Camels over here. Usually, Spider relaxed after the first few drags.
“White folks, you mean. Tourists. Comin’ to hear the natives.”
“It’s not just whites.”
“Then why you here, talkin’ to me? It’s history, right, what-all you slick professors study? Blues be history now, ready for the library or the museum. This weekend, we gonna be damned old dinosaur bones up on that stage. ‘These motherfuckers played the blues. Listen close. This is what it sounded like.’”
Hugh laughed, and popped open a Colt 45. He’d first heard Spider six years ago at the Crackerbarrel Lounge, a zydeco dance hall. That night, old black men in straw cowboy hats whirled teenage girls around a raised wooden platform. On stage, a man with an aluminum washboard strapped to his chest set the pace; Spider nailed down a “chanky-chank” beat. “Happy New Year!” yelled the accordion player, though it was the middle of July. Hugh fell in love with the music then and there. It made him feel he could start over, every minute, with a fresh chance at romance and fortune.
One night about two years ago, near the end of his marriage, his soon-to-be-ex, Paula, had burst into his study, twirling her skirt, revealing a happy length of thigh, and called him a “stuffy old fart.”
Later, at loose ends after his divorce, he’d decided she had a point: he needed changes in his life. New challenges. He’d gotten bored teaching intro history at the downtown junior college, writing articles on land grants, treaties, ancient Texas wars. Torts and reforms. Legislative agendas.
Then one day, listening to his car radio, he thought of Spider Lam-mamoor, and a light went on in his head. A history of the Houston blues. Like the great musicologist Alan Lomax, who’d gone to the Mississippi Delta in the early 1940s to record Muddy Waters on his farm, Hugh could catalog and help salvage a fine folk tradition.
It was full of risks — a white man using the blues to enter black culture, but Hugh, a native Houstonian, familiar with most of its neighborhoods, was sure he could avoid the pitfalls and tensions of such a project.
He went to the Crackerbarrel Lounge, asked around, but Spider had retired. He talked to the club’s owner three consecutive nights, swallowing half a dozen pitchers of foam masquerading as beer, and finally got an address.
He was lucky. Spider loved to talk. If Hugh kept him pumped with smokes and juice, the lanky old stickman would spin every tale he knew.
Already, Hugh had produced two long articles about KCOH, Houston’s only all-black radio station, now defunct. In the forties and fifties, it broadcast live from Emancipation Park, Shady’s Playhouse, Club Ebony, and the El Dorado. The DJs — King Bee, Daddy Deepthroat, Mister El Toro — had played dangerous, hip-grinding tunes white folks called “race records.” The term “rhythm and blues” hadn’t been coined yet.
In the past two years, Hugh had spent whole afternoons at the public library, flipping through photos of old neighborhoods. In crackling, sepia tones, black Houston hung her head (in the shape of stooping brown magnolias), tapped her feet (the splat of withered peaches pelting heat-blasted ground), leaped into dance (the swirl of a Cadillac fin in the sun).
This was “Mama Houston”—Spider’s phrase — loud and sweaty, sexy as a stripper, breathing hot and fast so her kids would shuck their shirts. Mama Houston, drunk on dewberries, ripe green apples, dizzy on her own delicious poisons — car exhaust, shit and ash and rust. She doesn’t always know what’s best for her kids, but she loves them all, smothers us all, Hugh thought, in her large and steamy arms.
Eighteen months ago, in their first session, Spider had told him about the dark days, in 1945, when J. C. Petrillo, president of the American Federation of Musicians, had banned recording on the grounds that jukeboxes would put his union out of business.
“Damn near killed the city blues, man,” Spider had said. “Didn’t get shit, playin’ live. Needed those contracts, eb’n though the record man cain’t be trusted.”
A few months ago, Hugh asked him why he’d retired.
Spider scratched his belly. “We’s playin’ one night down on Scott Street, middle of the summer, real hot, you know. Fight busted out. Fellow shot me in the shoulder.” He raised his right arm, gingerly, a long broken wing. “Kinda put a kink in my flamacue.”
Hugh pressed him: was he unable to play now? No. Spider asked for a second cigarette, another sip of beer. The wound had healed all right. It was just a matter of confidence.
Night after night, then, Hugh had driven him to some of the fancy new clubs in the Heights, where middle-class kids, both black and white, were trying to keep the old riffs alive. Once they recognized the old bluesman, they fawned over Spider, listened, rapt, as Hugh did, to his stories of the past. Finally, Hugh had persuaded Spider to take the stage again with some of this fresh new blood.