Song of Susannah - Stephen King [147]
He looked at her, smiled, and quit his fingerpicking. She raised one of the remaining bills and said, “I’ll give you this if you’ll play that song again. All of it, this time.”
The young man looked about twenty, and while there was nothing very handsome about him, with his pale, spotty complexion, the gold ring in one of his nostrils, and the cigarette jutting from the corner of his mouth, he had an engaging air. His eyes widened as he realized whose face was on the bit of currency she was holding. “Lady, for fifty bucks I’d play every Ralph Stanley song I know…and I know quite a few of em.”
“Just this one will do us fine,” Mia said, and tossed the bill. It fluttered into the busker’s guitar case. He watched its prankish descent with disbelief. “Hurry,” Mia said. Susannah was quiet, but Mia sensed her listening. “My time is short. Play.”
And so the guitar-player sitting on the box in front of the café began to play a song Susannah had first heard in The Hungry i, a song she had herself sung at God only knew how many hootenannies, a song she’d once sung behind a motel in Oxford, Mississippi. The night before they had all been thrown in jail, that had been. By then those three young voter-registration boys had been missing almost a month, gone into the black Mississippi earth somewhere in the general vicinity of Philadelphia (they were eventually found in the town of Longdale, can you give me hallelujah, can you please say amen). That fabled White Sledgehammer had begun once more to swing in the redneck toolies, but they had sung anyway. Odetta Holmes—Det, they called her in those days—had begun this particular song and then the rest of them joined in, the boys singing man and the girls singing maid. Now, rapt within the Dogan which had become her gulag, Susannah listened as this young man, unborn in those terrible old days, sang it again. The cofferdam of her memory broke wide open and it was Mia, unprepared for the violence of these recollections, who was lifted upon the wave.
* * *
Four
In the Land of Memory, the time is always Now.
In the Kingdom of Ago, the clocks tick…but their hands never move.
There is an Unfound Door
(O lost)
and memory is the key which opens it.
* * *
Five
Their names are Cheney, Goodman, Schwerner; these are those who fall beneath the swing of the White Sledgehammer on the 19th of June, 1964.
O Discordia!
* * *
Six
They’re staying at a place called the Blue Moon Motor Hotel, on the Negro side of Oxford, Mississippi. The Blue Moon is owned by Lester Bambry, whose brother John is pastor of the First Afro-American Methodist Church of Oxford, can you give me hallelujah, can you say amen.
It is July 19th of 1964, a month to the day after the disappearance of Cheney, Goodman, and Schwerner. Three days after they disappeared somewhere around Philadelphia there was a meeting at John Bambry’s church and the local Negro activists told the three dozen or so remaining white northerners that in light of what was now happening, they were of course free to go home. And some of them have gone home, praise God, but Odetta Holmes and eighteen others stay. Yes. They stay at the Blue Moon Motor Hotel. And sometimes at night they go out back, and Delbert Anderson brings his guitar and they sing.
“I Shall Be Released,” they sing and
“John Henry,” they sing, gonna whop the steel on down (great Gawd, say Gawd-bomb), and they sing
“Blowin in the Wind” and they sing
“Hesitation Blues” by the Rev. Gary Davis, all of them laughing at the amiably risqué verses: a dollar is a dollar and a dime is a dime I got a houseful of chillun ain’t none of em mine, and they sing
“I Ain’t Marchin Anymore” and they sing
in the Land of Memory and the Kingdom of Ago they sing
in the blood-heat of their youth, in the strength of their bodies, in the confidence of their minds they sing