Walkin' Blues: A Meditation and Speculation on the Life and Legend of Robert Johnson: Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Folks say everything come late to Mississippi, but, ain't so, fact is, seems like trouble and hardships be early to the table down here. They sits they rumps down on the gallery over to the general store and rests a spell before shoving off to visit other states. Like you take when 1928 rung in, while the rest of the country was still dancing and making merry, down in the delta the depression had already blowed the storm shutters off even the richest white folks' house. Shucks, when the official depression come, there wasn't hardly nothing left to depress on account of the 1927 mighty flood what had already knocked 'Sippi to its knees.

Walking on towards Greenwood or Ita Bena, even seven or eight months after the levees broke down, Robert had witnessed whole towns washed away, the general store a twisted skeleton, empty holes where windows and doors used to be, the town crossroads deserted, devoid of busy folks' comings and goings, acres and acres of fields lying fallow, even saw a cotton gin perched up in a cypress tree like some mechanical vulture, heaps of dead animal bones all over the place, somebody's boot sticking up heel first in the middle of the road, a leather tombstone marking what had once been a busy path, and a smelly muck coating everything what the waters didn't carry off.

Wasn't no odor worse smelling than the repulsive stench of flood funk, a combination of rot and outhouse excreta mixed with the foulness of dead fish, which there had been plenty of, all up and down the river roads. Robert would never forget that putridness, who could? 'Specially seeing as, for at least six or so months, the smell was able to fight off the bleaching powers of the sun. The Bible had said no more water—well, somebody must done misunderstood God's Word, cause the sun was hot alright, fire hot, but it had been the water that shouted and the funk the water left behind that whispered to folks: get out, go, go, go head on out of here.

The mighty flood had done run off heaps of people, run 'em clean out the state, well leastwise had run off them what had somehow survived the high waters. Plenty people didn't make it through the storm. Lots of folk went under, drowned or just plum disappeared. One day they was working, and cooking, and hauling stuff up and down the highway, and then like a candle snuffed out when a door blow open sudden like, just like that, peoples was gone. Gone. Just gone. Ain't nobody heard nothing no more from them. Gone, with nothing left behind to mark they had ever been there. Gone. Whole families, relatives and all they kin and friends, gone. It was horrible. It was so horrible you couldn't even stand to remember it. That's how horrible it was.

Though Robert was too young to have experienced the first one, and would die too early to know about number two, Robert guessed the devastation of the flood was like a world war or something. How could you beat the rain? How do somebody whip the river? Not even white folks with steel bridges and big levees, all kinds of boats with engines on them and fancy ways to tell when a storm was coming, naw, not even white folks could stop the flood from tearing up everything it touched. Robert would never forget what all he saw, and especially, he would not forget, what all he didn't see: the people, no animals, buildings and things that used to be here and there, now there was nothing there. Nothing. Just a big old emptiness. In fact, the loss hurt Robert so bad, he never could bring himself to write a song about it, and especially no song as deep powerful as Charley Patton's "High Water Everywhere."

One time when Robert was hoboing down to Yazoo, the guy...