Mister Satan's Apprentice: A Blues Memoir

Epilogue: April 1998

E P I L O G U E : APRIL 1998 IT AD TAKEN us four and a half years to rise from the sidewalks of Harlem to our first festival stage. We'd refer to those later, fondly, as "the street days." The street days waned during the summer of '91 and ended the following summer when Mister Satan, playing solo, was attacked one afternoon by a couple of kids brandishing the latest Harlem fad, "SuperSoaker" water-rifles. Our uptown tips had already thinned, a function of the success people rightly assumed we'd been enjoying elsewhere; the cops had nailed us the last couple of times we'd ventured down to Times Square. Mister Satan had had enough. He called me that night, fuming. "I ain't gotta put up with that effed-up bullcrap, man! Not from my own people!" The next moment he was philosophical. "The streets were there when we needed them. Now we don't and they ain't." I couldn't argue. Two pay phones had recently been installed on the wall just behind me, to the left of the New York Telephone office's front door. People were tripping over my cables and Mouses; 393 Epilogue young B-girls with long painted fingernails answering beeper-calls glared at me as they inserted quarters over the din of my amplified harp. Suddenly,pointedly, I was in the way. We'd already begun to move out into a larger world that seemed primed to embrace us. In the fall of '91 we'd been interviewed by Noah Adams on NPR's "All Things Considered"; we had a wellconnected manager, gigs up and down the East Coast. Harlem was still home base but no longer home. We bought a Sears clamshellfor the roof of my Honda and hit the road. We played the Chicago Blues Festival,the Newport JazzFestival, the Winnipeg Folk Festival, a dozen others over the next seven years. We worked tiny packed clubs and big empty clubs. We drove tens of thousands of miles—sharing cigarettes and stories, farting discreetly , cracking open a window, trading the wheel when exhaustion loomed. We never had an accident or missed a fly-in soundcheck: Dublin, Toronto, Sydney, Kansas City. We recorded two more albums—"Mother Mojo" (1993) and "Living on the River" (1996). Neither sold as well as "Harlem Blues," but we could count on a scattering of fans wherever we showed up. One winter we toured Finland and ended up at a ski resort in Akaslompolo, two hundred kilometers north of the Arctic Circle. Two drunken Finns staggered toward the stage, tore off their shirts—they were pale, lithe—and dry-humped in front of us as the crowd whooped. What hadn't the streets prepared us for? Minor celebrity beckoned, then faded. We paid our bills, barely. Mister Satan's gray beard slowly whitened; my red hair thinned. We left Talent Consultants International and bounced between smaller booking agencies. Mister Satan bought a car and he and Miss Macie moved down to Virginia,driving up to New York for our occasional weekend gigs. I returned to grad school after nine years away, having finally made peace with Helen's ghost and my own bookishness. The music was a good place to work out our griefs and hopes. "You'll live through it" was Mister Satan's constant refrain, when stomach acid or girlfriend troubles or record company hassles or doctoral qualifying exams wreaked havoc. "You'll damn sure live 394 Epilogue through it." He was from Mississippi and knew how trivial my gripes were. Several years ago, after an article about us in Harper's attracted an agent's interest, I began to write this memoir. Mister Satan gave me his blessings,pleased that somebody was finally telling our story. From time to time, curious, he'd ask how it was coming along. We'd reminisce about the street days during our long drives to Pittsburgh, Newport, Saratoga Springs. I'd ask him about people we'd known. Most of them had died. Professor had died, miserable old bastard. Mister Oscar had died. Miss Harisha had died. Mister Danny had stolen some money, run away upstate, and died. Mister Marvin was still around. Nobody had seen Mister James Gants in a couple of years. One afternoon in the fall of 1997, while he was driving us home from a gig in Portsmouth...