Adelaide’s Blues

The day I buried my mother I wore a scarf, bright like a ripe lemon, tied around my neck. I could feel the anger rising from her body laid out at my feet, steaming up the Delta air. The cloth I had wrapped her in sweated and clung to her naked frame, vulgar and shameless even in death.

I squinted up at the sky. The sun poured down my face, a dust speckled veil I had to squint through to see. A fine mist of pollen covered the mound of red dirt beside the grave Stan had dug. He stood at my side, careful to keep his feet from touching her. The legs of his overalls was caked up to his knees in mud the color of old blood.

“Got a Mississippi blues full’a heartache and tears. Got a Mississippi blues full’a heart-ache and tears. No mo’ smiles lef’ in me. Been hard all’a these years,” I sang, drawing out each word slow and heavy like she used to do.

“Got a Mississippi blues dark an’ lonely like tha night. Got a Mississippi blues dark an’ lonely like tha night. Ain’t neva known no peace. All my life been one long fight.”

That song had been my first big hit. Was in ‘39. “Rose Fuller’s Blues Band Presents,” it said on the sleeve. Got spins all the way out to Arkansas. Seen’t every juke and mess hall there was, Stan and me. Adelaide heard it too; known it was one of her own. Had the guards post me a letter up to Chicago. “I is your every breath,” was all it said. I burnt that shit with a lit dollar bill.

“Want me to put her in,” Stan said, anxious to get back up North to our shared house, away from the dirt roads of our youth.

“Sing with me now,” I said, looping my arm through his. He still had a beautiful voice. “You use’ta love to sing with Adelaide.”

“I ain’t knowed no better then,” he said, watching the clouds pass overhead. I could hear the tears in his words. “I ain’t knowed nothin’ ‘bout nothin’.”

If yesterday had been a surprise to him he hadn’t asked where we was goin’ when I come walking out the house dressed like Easter, overnight bag in hand. He’d folded his hands on top of his rake and tilted his head up at me.

“Well,” he’d asked, the pile of leaves at his feet blowing up around him. “Who that called here?”

He’d ridden with me all those long hours as the paved highways melted into mud and gravel. He’d walked with the guard past all the phantom old folks, vacant eyes wide, howling at their own reflections, to retrieve my mother’s body. He hadn’t said a word as I stripped her naked and wrapped her in broadcloth.

Now, I lay my head on his shoulder and squeezed his arm in mine like I’d done since we was small. We was always, it seemed, trying to keep each other from tears.

“She mad at me,” I said, smiling, “again. She gon’ be stuck down here for good.”

“Where ain’t shit but ugly niggas,” he said, mimicking her, the words bringing a smile to his long face.

“And uglier crackers,” I finished, fanning myself agitatedly with my purse like she would do. “Anyplace with white folks this ugly is no place for me.”

Stan pulled away and mimed smoking a cigarette with one hand on his poked out hip, booted foot tapping nervously.

“If I got to stay here longer than a Memphis minute, I’m liable to kill my ownself.”

He walked out into the overgrown field on imaginary high heels, swaying his hips and arranging his hat just so. I couldn’t help but smile looking at Adelaide alive once again, tall and dark as a country midnight, small breasted and wide hipped, with a melody of movement that made everyone stare.

“Jesus,” he turned to me, “You call this place a...