When we reached the crossroads at 49 and 61, I looked over at the big metal sculpture someone had erected to the history of the blues. Metal guitars and road signs. I knew there wasn’t any real crossroads and it was a nice gimmick to bring folks in. But it made me think about something Tip-Top had said.
“Is blues dead?”
JoJo thought about that as we headed down 49 and passed by the old Hopson plantation where JoJo had worked as a child. The old commissary was now some kind of bar. The sharecroppers’ shacks motel rooms to give tourists a feel for the old days.
The sun was gone. It was night. Only the headlights of the truck and Annie’s panting to keep us company.
“About the best I can say is it’s different,” he said. “Ain’t the same. Doesn’t mean the same.”
I saw his old profile in the dim light as we rounded onto the footbridge and country road to take us home.
1
Sirens ain’t nothin’ but ghosts. They reach out every damn night, red and blue, white spotlight flashin’ ’cross your eyes as you sleep on that concrete floor patterned in blood and dirt. You covered in a torn yellow blanket that once hid your dead mamma for weeks. In its touch, you see a bit of her cold ear and the edge of that face you tried not to imagine while you kept goin’ to school, cuttin’ her las’ ten dollars in a hundred ways at Rob’s Party Store down on Claiborne. You remember? Don’t you?
Back then, you hold your own in the Calliope yard, the ole CP-3, and find your only friends are a mean-ass pit bull you call Henry and a little rottweiler with short legs you name Midget. Your mamma stay alive to you for weeks underneath that blanket. Through it all, she stay like she is ’cause that room don’t have no heat and it’s February, like it is now, and her own family live on the other side of the project.