Leaving Avalon, 1994

 

  See You In Hell, Blind Boy is a novel I've been working on for a number of years, since my first novel Enemy Ace: War Idyll actually. It's a text novel that incorporates comics, spot illustrations, photographs and a DVD of some of the music and interviews I made while on the road in the Mississippi Delta researching the project. Dark Horse Publishing is interested in the project and it looks like this book will finally see print.

   A documentary film by the same name has also been completed by me, Steven Budlong and James McGillion. It was on the Film Festival circuit when we first finished it and we won Best Feature Documentary in the New York International Independent Film Festival.

  Below is a single chapter of See You In Hell, Blind Boy along with a few images to whet your appetite.

 

CHAPTER 34

    Turning past Lucille Hurt's dwelling, we make our way up the slick, rutted road deeper into the woods of Avalon. The sun slinks behind the clouds in anticipation of our pilgrimage to John Hurt's grave; so solemn an occasion deserves weather of the same.
    The windows are down and the smell of moist loam invades our nostrils, the humid air cool and refreshing. Sky-pools lap the edges of the ruts and I keep rushing them, hoping speed will win the way. Muddy water fans away from the wheels in great plumes of spray. There's a couple of close calls, the car slides close to an embankment, then—stuck.
    I try rocking out, forward and reverse, but I'm only digging us deeper. We both get out and try pushing—no luck. Scavenging about we gather up as much loose wood as possible, jam it under the tires and, using man- and engine-power, try to dislodge the car. To no avail.
    Leaning against the side-panels, we're breathless.
    John shakes his head and smiles. "Mississippi mud."
    "You want to just walk there?"
    He shrugs his shoulders. "I don't mind."
    I grab my camera and recorder, lock the car up and we suction-cup our way uphill.
    "From here on back is Avalon," John says, surveying the surrounding forest. We walk past a scenic overlook that allows us a panoramic view of the Delta floodplain, stretching below us in flatland grandeur.
    "It really is beautiful here."
    "Uh-hunh, you see how fertile it is back here," he says.
    There's volume to this big silence and our voices are loud. I can see our reflections in the water, two ghosts balancing upside down in a mirror world.
    "There used to be a path there," John says, pointing towards a line of hedges so deep they look like one mass. "We used to walk across there to our house. It don't hardly look like the same place."
    "It's grown up so much?"
    "Yeah. It really has that. This used to be a dusty road in the summertime."
    "Can hardly believe it now, lookin' at it," I say, sidestepping another puddle.
    "Sure cain't," he says. "This was a small community. Lot of farmin' goin' on."
    We walk for quite a ways, hopscotching puddles, pine needles spongy beneath our shoes. The road is a ravine, the roots of trees exposed like worms burrowing from the soil after long rains. The deeper we travel the more confined the sound becomes, smothered by the trees.
    I notice that John's gotten quiet again. We must be close.

    There's a spot in the road where you can almost make out a path, and John takes this. Just ahead, beyond a fallen tree, I see a familiar headstone. John stops and looks at his father's grave. His is the only stone in the cemetery. All other graves are discernible only by small plastic markers pushed into the ground, and by moss-covered earth sunken to delineate the contours of the graves themselves. I notice that the money I'd seen before is gone from the base of the stone.
    John stares silently at his father's grave, uncertain about going in. He pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and wipes his eyes.
    He's been crying and I haven't even noticed.
    We stand for a minute, then step across the fallen tree, John leading me to his father.

John S Hurt 1892-1966

   His father's stone is simple, not much to look at. It certainly doesn't hint at the richness of the man it shelters.
    Neither of us say a word.
    What I thought was quiet on the road is even more so here. Those that lie in this soil, are indeed at rest. Through a small clearing in the treetops, stars can shine down on gentle evenings and light John Hurt's grave.
    John sits down next to his father, almost hugging the stone, and I sit at the foot of the grave on a piece of slate.
    As quietly as possible I break the silence. "How old were you when your father passed away?"
    "I was thirty three. No—thirty four."
    "Did a lot of people come out here that day?"
    "Mm-hmm." He inspects his fathers stone and brushes some loose grass from its face. The ground is mostly dirt and fallen leaves.
    "Was he born in Avalon?"
    "No. He was born in a place called Teoc, but it was still in Carol County. Moved up here when he was eight years old. When he started playin' guitar. Lived around where the church was."
    He sits silent for a moment before speaking again.
    "I come out every so often to clean up and all, you know?" he says, almost to himself. "I-I don't mind comin'. But, you know, it just seem like he ought to be with me."
    I nod. "It feels good to be here, but then it doesn't feel good to be here."
    "That's right," he says. "That's just . . . that's just the way it is."
    "Can you hear his music out here?"
    "I always hear it. That's every day. I guess it's no use to worry though. 'Cause that's not go'n brang him back. But I cain't help it."
    I ask him, "When you hear his music, does it make you feel good?"
    "It makes me feel good in a way. Then it makes me feel . . . kinda bad in a way. You know, what I mean is, to be sorry."
    He turns his head away from me, towards the stone which he lingers over, and I wonder what he's thinking, what he sees in his mind right now. I see images of John Hurt from old photographs, and add to them my own animations of him through his music. John's must be those intimate details that we each carry of our fathers. The way his father would rise in the morning for work, the way he ate his breakfast, the whole waking ritual, the familiar laughter and the remembered tread of his shoes on the plank floor, the smell of his coat; all the little things that really nail a person down, those sides shown only to family.
  

John Hurt Jr. at his father's grave in Avalon, Miss.
    "He'd probably be glad you're makin' music now." I say.
    "Yeah. Yeah, prob'ly. He was seventy four years old when he passed away. And he could get on both of his hands and his feet and have a dance called the rabbit hop. Sounded like he's beatin' the floors like doin' a drum. I mean he could get down there good and jump. He really could do that!"
   
"Well, everybody in Avalon sure does love your father."
    "Yeah. Yeah. He was just the same—always. Just the same."
    Silence again, the winds blow evenly above our heads, but remain in the higher branches. There are long patches of quiet, but they aren't uncomfortable.
    He turns his red eyes up from his father's grave and into my mine.
    "Before he passed away," he says, "he was out here hunting. Hunting squirrels in the woods, you know? He said when he shot the gun, then that stroke come. Kinda twisted his mouth a little bit. Not real bad, but just a little bit. He made out to the road, where to go to the cemetery? And he say he tried to whistle, he couldn't whistle. He say he tried to sing, couldn't sing. And he didn't last long behind that."
    His rock-steady eyes never waver from my own while leaves whisper at our feet.
    "I was livin' up here in the delta," he says. "I was up here that Monday night. And when I got ready to leave, he told me that there wasn't no need to leave now. But I didn't know what he was talkin' about. And that Wednesday the cab driver, Tyree Trussel, he came and told me, say— 'He gone.' . . . It hurt me so bad . . . It hurt me so bad."
    His tears fill my eyes and I am hushed by his pain. After thirty years he still grieves for his father. Not for the bluesman, Mississippi John Hurt—but for the father. A gentle, caring father.
    "I loved my father. He was a great man."
    "Yes. He was."
    "I didn't want to see him go."
    What can I say? I search for some small set of words that won't be intrusive, yet might give him some comfort. Knowing all the time that there are no words that can salve the loss of his father.
    "Do you like listening to his songs?"
    "Yeah. I just loved to sit down in his lap. I could sit down in his lap and he would play for me. But he wouldn't learn me how to do it, you know. But I'd sit down in his lap!" He smiles, wiping his tears on the arm of his jacket.
    "What songs did you ask him to play?"
    "I loved StaggerLee. That's my favo-rite song! Yeah, I loved StaggerLee. I can see him right now in my mind."
    He looks about the small burial ground and wipes his eyes again.
    "There was another song that him and momma used to sing together: My True Love, I'll Forgive You Before I Go. Momma would tenor, and daddy would do the alto! I loved that," he says, laughing now.
    "He was always, you know, alive and happy," he says.
    I look up at the clearing above our heads and think of those stars.
    "He believed in Heaven?" I ask.
    "Yeah. He was just like that. He was just like that. He didn't like no kind of violence whatsoever. And if you liked it, he didn't want to be around you."
    I think his father would have liked it up here where the sound hasn't invaded. There's only the swaying of trees, and maybe the rabbit and squirrel he was fond of hunting. It fills me with awe and a kind of strength to know that people from such simple roots can touch so many.
    "You ever just come out here and sit and think?"
    "No. But there's not a day pass that I don't thank about him."

    We get up and start to walk back. The light is beginning to fail and we need to get the car unstuck. On the way out John stops next to a branch sticking from the ground. He stands without talking, then wipes his eyes again.
    "My momma's buried here. I know she is because I put this stick here, so I'll know. She don't have a stone yet, but I'm go'n get her one. Someday."
    Something dies inside of me. We stand there for perhaps five minutes. John tells me that his daddy would play in the St. James Church that once stood across the road from where we are. He said that most people would pretend that they liked it, and some didn't. His father would play the blues a little bit, too.
    He remembers one woman who told his daddy that he was going to send himself to Hell, playing the blues.
    "My momma told him, she say, 'Listen, John,' I heard her when she told him. She say, 'Listen John. There's people goin' to Hell ain't never no seen a guitar!'" He laughs. "She say, 'You've been goin' since God gave you that talent, so let's go ahead on and do.'
    "Yeah. I had a marvelous momma."


Mississippi John Hurt