GRAND OPERA AND PARLOR JUNK

Tallahatchie Flats, north of Greenville on the banks of the Tallahatchie River. A barren field some 2 acres long. A mighty tent, roped and guyed:
ship’s cable onto 2 foot long stakes. 4 union flags banging in the big, fat afternoon wind…

A long queue straggles. Kids fighting. A big sister hits out at a barefoot boy. A dungaree fool and his sweetheart bust a bottle of Old Crow. Sal Silverheels plays the line, his two spoons dancing
off his knees. All moving slowly through the tent door and spreading like the Big Muddy into the sea…

It’s like a canvas cathedral, all evening light and dust and echo. Fishbone seating filling fast. Popcorn girls in satin shorts and hotdog boys with steaming carts. Too close for comfort, dancers somersault along the aisles, barelegged, wild-eyed. One stops, panting, gleaming. A mother covers
her teenage son’s wide-open eyes. White folk move in packs, brown derbys tilted, shimmy skirts held down. But no one cares. No town cops cruising, tapping billy clubs. There’s a colour-blind connection, first over that gap between their ranks of seats and then, when the tent’s a Deep-South tin roof church fit to bust, no one cares again. All are ripe with joy for tonight.
This is a sawdust Sodom where all will receive another kind of gospel altogether..!

Heavy curtains, like for the biggest parlour window in the world. Four men in undershirts chewing stogies
hang hard onto sisal ropes. A barker runs across the stage cutting the air with his arm. “Let ‘er go!” The ropes are tugged at speed, hand-over-hand.
Bottom corners first, the curtains soar up like geese on the rise. And the sound that passes through that congregation is like a wind through river reeds…

They laugh until they weep against each others’ heaving shoulders. Ole Massa Melon chases the chicken thief up both curtains and through the band. And they dance in their seats and on
their seats and out in the aisles. The Wildcats tease their feet, their legs, their hips, their arms. Tishimingo, Moonshine, Hustlin’ Blues. Trumpet
ducks and trombone pumps the empty air above.. Bass sax bullfrogs, banjo clanks and the big cymbal hisses like a snake. Hoofers leap and spin, each
on a dime. And a long gliding line of boys wearing white ducks and sailors’ tops come kicking down to the front of the stage. High yaller, light brownskin,
gazing high above the raised faces, arrogant apollos to stop the hearts of every sweetheart, boy or girl, who watches and adores.

And then, like the gospel sea, they part and form two tidal breaking waves – step forward, step back, reveal, conceal, reveal. A roaming spot throws a coin of gold and down she comes – it’s gold-necked Ma Rainey, the Mother of the Blues! She strides like a man down
the people avenue, her arms raised, a brilliant grin across a face glazed like bronze, satin and silk across, around, behind in a train. She reaches up and cups a dancer’s face – “Ma pigmeat boy!” she cries, and hits the downbeat twice in the bar. It’s Lost Wandering Blues and the poorboys and the passers-through know what
she means when she stands there pondering, wondering “will a matchbox hold my clothes?” Then she sashays back up to where the girls are kicking high. She tips one tiny chickadee across her lover’s arm and she turns their two heads away. Prove It On Me, is what she wants to know right now. But each lonely wife and jilted lover yells hallelujah, sing it, sister when she tells them all
“They must’ve been women ‘cause I don’t like no men!”

All that sweat and sparkle, high-heel sneaking, cussing out the band (who laugh and fat-lip bronx cheers back),
kisses blown and back-of-hand secrets told and then it’s nearly time to strike the stage and pull the guy-lines. So she breaks their hearts with the truest of them all, “See See Rider, see what you have done done, Lord, Lord, Lord, made me love you, now your gal done come”. Then it’s all brass and ballyhoo with the whole damn show down front and Stack O’Lee Blues for all to sing. And then it’s the last dance – brothers and sisters for one night only doing the black bottom all the way down the aisles and back to where she’s shaking it out between two slick-haired, snake-hipped boys in sharkskin. And then Ma Rainey beats the air – 1, 2, 3, 4 – and all that’s left is echo on echo and feathers and straw adrift in the spotlight beam…

And they flow out into the night like a storm drain in flood.The jive-ass white kids swing into their Chryslers and Fords; the black folk walk through rising dust to the railroad station. And behind, the men with stogies wrestle out the stakes and let the guy lines slip. Eight trucks and buckboards take the weight and drive off into the night. And it’s white steam and smokestack sparks from Ma Rainey’s train of troupers, pulling out of Tallahatchie Flats to cross the Greenville Trestle west to Lufkin, Deep East Texas where there’s a fairground and a thousand and more starlight dreamers, black and white, fisting dollars, fixing collars, raising hollers into the blue dark.