Free Music of the Swamp by Lewis Nordan Page B

train. I breathed the hot exhaust from the diesel. I clung with my one good hand to the ladder and a part of me dreamed a joyful waking dream of falling beneath the wheels. Once, at a cattle crossing, where the train slowed, two children threw rocks at me, and one of the rocks hit my bad hand. The pain of loss and hopelessness caused by that lucky shot was inseparable from my father’s drunkenness and the big Philco and Stan the Man. I yelled at the children, “Niggers!” The train slogged on down the line. I yelled, “You could put somebody’s eye out!” I laughed my damn head off when I heardmyself say this. I sounded just like my mother. I thought of my blind grandfather and Sammy Davis, Jr. I was a sick and bitter child.
    Later that day, delirious with fever and loss, I stepped off the train into a cinder lot in sight of the Mississippi River. I did not even look at the river. I had escaped nothing, proved nothing. I walked far across the train yard until I came to a warehouse with baggage carts parked beside it. Under one of the carts was a black man having an epileptic seizure. It lasted a long time, and all I knew to do was stand and watch. I had never heard the word epilepsy at this time. I was so sick I actually thought for one second that I was at home in my bed having a nightmare about living in the house with my family. When the seizure ended the man slept and snored and finally woke up and sat up for a while with his face in his hands. At last he struggled to his knees and then to his feet, and set out across the lot with a slow and wobbly gait. Behind him I called, “I’m sorry!” I sat down where he had been sitting, under the baggage cart. I thought of the long black train. I thought of bean fields and rice paddies and buckshot and gumbo. I lay down and believed that I would die. I suffered chills and fever, and I slept two hours of black sleep before I woke, feeling better.
    And now here is a strange thing. In fact, it’s the strangest thing I know of.
    When I woke up, no one was nearby. The cinder lot wasdeserted. I looked around for the man who had suffered the seizure, but he was gone, of course. I walked out of the railroad yard and down long sad streets of shanties. I lost sight of the big river.
    I came to a small café with a sign that said REGAL . It was owned by a skinny white-trash man with a big Adam’s apple and a yellow dog.
    The man looked at me. I was black with cinders and train filth. The man let me use the telephone.
    I said, “Mama?”
    My mother said, “Sugar?”
    I said, “I’m filthy and I’m hungry and I’m sick and I want to die. I watched a man have a fit.”
    My mother said, “Sugar-man, your grandfather can
see
! It’s a miracle.”
    I said, “I’m in Greenville. Can you come get me?”
    She said, “Of course we can, Sugar-man, but aren’t you happy? Your grandfather who was blind is no longer blind and now can see. It’s like the Bible.”
    I said, “Something worked.”
    My mother said, “I think it’s love. Love is always the answer.”
    The white-trash man with the yellow dog said, “I wouldn’t want to rush you, son, but like the poet said, Time is money.”
    I hung up and said, “My grandfather’s sight came back. He was blind until today.”
    The white-trash man took a big handful of the skin of the dog’s back in his hand and gave it a couple of good yanks. The dog looked back over its shoulder at the man, lovingly, and the man yanked the dog’s skin again. The man said, “Your granddaddy ain’t the first white man to get cured for spite.”
    I said, “He’ll have to learn how to watch television.”
    The white-trash man said, “You ort to get somebody to look at that hand.” He said, “Don’t be touching my dog, I wouldn’t want it to catch nothing.” This was a joke,