I stayed long enough to finish the bottle , together . We 'd both slept with our clothes on . ( The last woman I loved back home refused to take hers off the last night we slept together , on top of my bed . It was our last time because after loving her as completely as I was capable of loving anyone , I started taking her for granted and leaving her too much alone and after a long while she left and a year later came back to say goodbye because I was leaving , even telling me she might follow , but never did , and I 'm glad now , she found a much better man , one who would do anything for her , and did . . . ) She drove me to Ruby 's place and kissed me goodbye , peck on the cheek , then even more briefly on the lips . I thanked her for rescuing me from last night 's horror . She didn 't know Gomez did things like that , she said . Watch him , I warned her . She laughed at that . She just came for the outdoor movies , she quipped . I never did get her name and she never asked mine . I liked that , J . C . wasn 't much to be . Ruby told me she went out with the horn man and Delia , of course , with the drummer . Ruby said she liked him a lot and planned to see him again . Okay , I said , I 'll find another place . She said , Now , don 't be difficult , baby . . . but she didn 't disagree . Then I went out and had a drink in a bar down the wharf from where we 'd been last night . I don 't mind telling you I was hoping I 'd see the woman who stood by the door . . . I didn 't . I got a little more drunk instead . I went back to St . Louis Cathedral and told the priest that I wasn 't Catholic but then I wasn 't anything , and explained where I 'd come from and what church was like there . He listened and smiled and said , Drop by again , I always try to be here when no one needs me elsewhere . Then he said , Wait a minute , and left a moment returning with a sheaf of blank paper and a pen . If you think I wrote anything that day , I wrote my name again at the top of the page , then another letter to my mother saying again what I 'd said the night before and couldn 't find now , but when I was finished I damn sure didn 't call it writing . Maybe I should just put my ambition aside and either make money on the wharf or go back to the mountains , where I had always belonged . I wandered around a good while before reaching the Vieux Carre . He didn 't tell anyone his name , said , Just call me The Mexican . I called him el mejicano , and that may be why he wouldn 't let me alone until now , when I said , Sure , hombre , I 'll come over to your house soon as I finish here . I got something to do , he said , I 'll be there about the same time as you . . . I didn 't want to go , but yet I didn 't know why . I kept thinking about Ruby , I remembered Blanche , I wanted to stay and drink myself to sleep , but they didn 't rent rooms here . In the old days , I hear there were rooms upstairs where you could sleep or . . . and / or , that is . . . Thus the hesitation , the conscience almost mastering desire , getting the better of my inclinations , my need . When the bistro closed , I bought a bottle of rye and followed the directions quite a ways on foot to a dark street where I could see light coming from inside a courtyard and once inside there was a projector at one end with a Charlie Chaplin movie across the yard , at the wall 's other end . Some people were sitting on couches and on pillows on the grassless ground , overhead the moon ducking under clouds and just as suddenly emerging to check Chaplin 's progress . I opened the bottle and watched the rest of " The Pilgrim . " This guy was a hustler preacher on the move and here he was , in a new small town , taking his measure of the yokels . I sipped and viewed and I dozed off and woke to find " Sunnyside " playing . A blonde - haired girl sitting alone above me on a couch leaned over and asked if I was okay , I said yes and offered her a drink from my bottle but she smiled , shook her head no , and we both returned to watching Chaplin . I thought to leave , maybe Ruby was home by now . . . Maybe she preferred J . C . over that man and his sweet horn . . . El mejicano came into the courtyard guiding a woman , staggering , to the outside stairs . She had long red hair and was too much to drink . Once up the stairs he led her through the door and disappeared . About a half hour passed until my host came out of the door and called down to me , Come up here , gringo , and take your turn ! My turn ? I yelled back , Whatdya mean , hombre ? Gringo , he replied , you don 't know what you 're missing . Nobody else seemed to pay any attention . Well , I found out . . . her red hair was real , alright , but she was crazy drunk and this roomful of men was taking turns , which followed me , that image of what I saw and knew was why I 'd hesitated coming here just because I was afraid something like this would happen , besides I knew when I arrived that outside stairway didn 't promise anything but misery . I leaned over the railing , threw up , got near the bottom of the stairs before retching and heaving again , and the blonde on the couch looked up at me and beckoned me over . . . I wanted to , mind you , and if I hadn 't taken The Mexican up on his invitation and gone upstairs and seen what I saw , let alone come over to this house in the first place . . . I said , I 'm sick , I gotta go home . She said , Can I see you home ? I said , I don 't know where I live . She took me to her place . Southern women are the most polite women on God 's earth , and more polite the farther south you go . She had a car outside and drove to her cottage - no shotgun shack for this lady , she could afford a white girl 's bungalow . I don 't know what I did but sleep , and when I asked her she said something like , You were sick , honey , I brought you here to get you well . I asked , Where 's my bottle ? And she : Here . I didn 't move right away , she stood there rapt , the music poured past us , into the street , across the river , maybe all the way back to where it was said it started with this guy whose horn you could hear all the way from over there . I did back up an inch so I could see her . She was tall , brown , and beautiful would not be quite the word . She did not move , the music kept going , I inched my way into the street , looked around , maybe even the moon looked down , well maybe , who could say . . . in the state I was in . The song I don 't remember , after all it was only a set of drums and a horn , and maybe others were , like me , curious how that could be . . . did they think of that guy , what was his name . . . maybe he didn 't exist , but every body here remembered , every finger , every toe . . . I looked in and the place was crammed with souls . I kept looking at her watching the stage . She didn 't move , the music didn 't end , I walked away , down the street , by the water , wondering how far I would have to go before I reached the silence . It wasn 't that I didn 't want to stay and listen , but I wanted even more to go read in that book with the Japanese rock - garden cover that begins with " Difficulties of a Birdhouse Builder " and ends . . . well , Reynolds wrote more books and after Mexico City disappeared , they say , though I found his name in something from L . A . , maybe it was a poem , one of those cascading , seemingly breathless runs down the scale , like " Que . " I kept walking , keeping by the river , taking a stroll I 'd call it . Maybe I was young , but it felt late . I had to find out what I wanted , what I could do . I loved to read , what nobody understood where I came from , and if you didn 't read you had no reason to write , well , maybe I should see what happened when I wrote . But no , what I really wanted to do was get lost . Someone had left a pen and piece of paper in a pew of St . Louis Cathedral . I wrote my name , " J . C . , " up in one corner , then started remembering the music I 'd been hearing , thinking you don 't need much sound , just the kind that wraps around you and holds you in what feels like a caress the tone is so full , the beat insisting this is where it will stay unless sound goes deeper than ever . Something like that . A priest came over , greeting me , the only parishioner there . . . and me the heathen spawn of snake - handlers in hollows of the Blue Ridge , but I felt at home here and said so , and thanked the priest when he asked if there was anything he could do for me and I asked for and received more paper . . . What I did was write a letter to my mother . I kept the stuff about the music here to myself , though I did say I missed the music there . What else I said was where I was , not with whom , not even how I felt about anything . I gave her some news , that 's all . I went back to the café . The woman was gone . Ruby was gone , as was the horn man . So was Delia and her drummer . Was the music over ? Or was I between sets ? I would sit down and have a beer and look over what I said to the paper , which never interrupted . . . but somebody showed up . The Mexican . He would be having a party and asking me to come . I didn 't know why I 'd say yes now after so many refusals , but say yes I did . . . I should have stayed with no . Truth be told , I didn 't go anywhere but to work next day and those that followed . I hated to jilt Blanche , but I did . I rationalized it by telling myself she would 've done the same if she 'd been in my place . I did go back a week later and ask the desk clerk if she was still there , and she was , so I handed him an envelope to put in her mailbox , which he did ; it contained all but a few dollars of my first paycheck , which being a stevedore , was considerable . I wrapped a note around the cash saying how fine a woman she was , and other things I suspected would anger her , but I had my say because I had a fine time with her and she should know it , even if she would be angry for a long time until she forgot she 'd ever known me . I know that sounds self - serving but so be it , I 'd rather say it , if only to myself . I hate to think about what a bastard I 've been , but it would have been worse if I 'd kept it up . Ruby and Delia introduced me to the music . They 'd only been there a little while - they met up in Memphis and got the lay of that town before they came through Mississippi here , where they really fell in love with the music of the place , the South I mean . And we thought that being from Virginia we knew all the music there was . . . but hell , that 's how it must always be , going from one place to another to live : you thought you knew enough to gauge what it would be like anywhere else , at least until you arrived and wised up . Ruby and I got back to being where we 'd been , once . Delia found a kid she liked and he showed her the town . Being young , younger than Ruby and me , they had a good time and were gone all but when Delia came home for a change of duds . Her friend was a drummer , he said , and I took his word for it until one night Delia and Ruby asked me to come along and listen to the music . I loved being by the river even if I worked there . They had the door open , it was a warm night , and I decided to stand by the door while Ruby and Delia went to find a seat . The sounds outside and inside mingled and I felt like I was in the middle of something I loved . Not that I knew why . I had experienced feelings like these in the mountains when the birds and the animals made their sounds in the wind blowing through the trees . Here , it was like living on the water , which made me feel new , I 'd never been down by the water until now , and once I got used to it I knew I would overdo it the way I overdid everything I learned to love alone . I also knew it was dangerous to get so wrapped up in something you started dreaming you were swimming , say , when you were sleeping . You had to stay at least a little conscious if you were going to surface to breathe and not get pulled under where , hell , no one can keep living just to learn to love water . But this was something I 'd never felt until now . The kid on the drums laid down the beat and the guy on the horn was damned good , I said aloud . The woman who 'd stepped through the door , standing beside me , echoed my words . ( 27 October 2011 ) I got up and went to the docks , Blanche went looking for work , the rest of the time we walked and fucked and talked about our lives . Blanche came from poor folks in Memphis , she wanted to hear all about growing up in the Blue Ridge , I said she couldn 't go by what I went through , I read all the time I wasn 't working and I had a kinsman played a bugle while his siblings thought what he played was dance music . She told me my stories were all worth listening to , so I kept talking as long as she lay naked beside me , she had the most beautiful body I had seen yet , I told her , and I was young enough to show her how much she was appreciated . Then we went out to a café to eat and bought some food from the grocery to bring back to the room , where Blanche made sandwiches for tomorrow . The Mexican kept wanting me to come over to this house he lived in and join the party some night . I told him I had a woman and he said to bring her too . I kept putting him off , I didn 't know anything about the house or the parties , or the people he lived with , not to mention himself . We would go out and have a beer after work and go our separate ways , though he always wanted me to have another , but I was never much of a drinker , I had other ways to spend my time , I told him . But he kept on with the invitations ; daily , after a while , until I asked Blanche if she wanted to go , and she demurred , said I could but she would rather stay in the hotel and rest up for the next day . She had found a waitressing job and it wore her to a frazzle . I said I had no need to go to any party , I had one right here , and after we shared what we had we slept soundly . Then I met Ruby on the wharf . She was walking by and saw me working . Actually , I was taking a break . She came over and gave me a hug and a kiss and told me she was so glad to see me she liked to die when she looked and there I was . . . A black woman embracing a white man didn 't draw the attention here it did in the mountains , where we had to sneak around to see each other like this , though neither of us were working when we met . Besides , my father 's people came from Africa , but pretty far back so you had to hear it from him since his skin was a light cream hue and he passed without a hitch . He said , J . C . , you don 't have to worry , your mama 's as white as snow and I 'm the same color with a little earth mixed in . . . Ruby had told me all about Delia and her daddy . I heard the story too many times to ever forget it , and believe me , I wanted to . . . I didn 't want to believe she had loved another man before me and I hated the story of how he killed her brother and she made him get her with child before he ran away so she could remember him each time she looked at her daughter and think about how something good , someone she would love forever , came of the whole goddam stupid tragedy of her life . Reynolds didn 't care whether he was from the South . He did the best he could with what he had . Which was considerable . He went to college before the army and then after he got out . I didn 't know him then . But I knew his poetry , Ryoanji especially , that book with the famous Japanese rock garden on the cover . I didn 't like poetry , understand , at least not what I 'd read until then . And I can 't remember how in hell I ever found the book , I must have been walking in the woods , looked down , and there it was , soaked in dew , maybe even rained on , and I had to let it dry out in sunshine before I could make out the words . It would 've helped to 've read some good poems before then , but I hadn 't had that kind of time , I was always doing odd jobs for people who had no idea what a poem was let alone a whole book of them . Then I happened to meet him in Roanoke , he was reading from his book in a store there , I saw the poster and decided to go . He was a little guy , wiry , quick witted , full of opinions about things I had never heard of , names especially , Borges , Cummings , somebody else whose name started with P , Poe maybe , or Paz . I asked him what by them I might read , and he just looked at me , sizing me up before answering , Read whatever you can find , this is oral culture up here , books are few and far between , but I suspect you know that . I did . I was young enough to feel deprived , though . Nobody cared if I read anyway . All they wanted was a hard day 's work that was worth the money they paid me . Here I was , in the city of dreams , some called it . The woman beside me said her name was Blanche . I knew a lot of women named Blanche . She had helped me sleep and I asked if she would stay if I could find work here to pay our bills . She said she 'd work too . Blanche left the hotel room first , said she 'd come back to the lobby and wait as long as she needed . She was going to find a waitressing job , she said , she had left her family back there , she didn 't say where , but wherever it was she had been very unhappy there , she told me that much . When I went down to the wharf to ask for work as a stevedore I thought about Ruby and then about Delia . Somewhere they were both here , or I thought they must be by now . The boss said they could try me out for a day , there was a guy didn 't show up this morning , he added . I had to get back in shape , I was flabby with the idle life , and working in the mountains never took the exertion I needed to feel stronger . So I stayed that day and the boss said for me to come back the next . This Mexican guy and me hit it off so we had a drink at Jean Lafitte 's Blacksmith Shop before going our separate ways . Blanche was waiting in the lobby and looked better than ever to me . We told the guy at the desk we would stay another night and she paid for the room just like she had the previous night . After we went to bed and were rested we went out to eat and damned if I didn 't nearly run into Ruby walking with Delia on Tchoupitoulas Street , but I turned into Blanche and embraced her in a long kiss , she was caught by surprise but delighted , and when I knew I had not been seen I started to continue the walk but Blanche took me aside and in an alley we rubbed against one another and fondled each other under our clothes and finally we were okay to walk again . I knew I should never have started something this serious . I have always viewed my own actions as not only perilous to myself but a source of indignation , even disgust , for others . Probably I find it more difficult to live with myself than others do . If I don 't make love one day I will go looking for a woman the next ; this is usually the case , for the women who know me have no patience for what I require of them . I reached for Ruby when I woke and she brushed my hand away and rolled over . That was as close as we came to fucking . I am not proud of my intentions . She had had enough of men for a good long while . She said nothing over breakfast . I talked of Delia . Why follow her now ? I asked . We know where she will be . So do I , Ruby replied . When Ruby left the table , leaving me with the check , I ordered rum with extra limes . When the glass was empty save for the limes and a few surviving ice cubes I ordered another , telling the waitress to leave the limes that were in the glass already and don 't bother to add any . I was going to have one more while I decided what to do next . I left without paying the bill let alone waiting for the second drink . I went to the john and exited the back door . In the sunshine I reveled in the Memphis warmth . But , as I say , I longed to be in Audubon Park . There is only one . The limes left a taste in my mouth I remembered from Roanoke , where I lived when I came of age . I learned to drink rum there and the limes were , for me , a natural part of the mix . I would ladle the limes out with a spoon - I loved to eat and then have a drink , I was that virginal - and chew them until spitting the rinds out . I may have loved the limes more than the rum , but I knew they only helped me feel the way I did , they couldn 't do the job alone . I walked in the alley to the bus station . I still had money in my pocket . There was none in the duffel bag , just a change of clothes and a book or two . " Light in August " and " A Curtain of Green , " say . I could find a paperback in the bus station if I needed one . But I didn 't bother . Delia was heading for Memphis , like the song informs us was where what happened happened . I do not write songs , I am what you call laborious . Synonym for prose . I can 't tell you how she got there , but she did . Remember , she arrived long ago , long before Elvis . W . C . Handy was memorialized on Beale Street . I thought it was in St . Louis . Her mother was with me . Ruby wanted to get a room in a hotel and get up fresh tomorrow morning and look for her . We did . We broke our fast . We slept well . We rose at first light . It was a long way I was glad she had gone . In our day it took longer to get here from there . Now you can fly , but not like a bird . There is no such freedom in our provinces . She told her mother she planned to keep on going . We could follow if we wished , but don 't expect her to take time to explain herself or show us New Orleans . Ruby was delighted to hear we would be following her as far as New Orleans , her very own childhood dream city . First , there were the towns : Oxford , Faulkner 's ; Jackson , Welty 's . In Vicksburg I remembered Reynolds was born . I got it wrong somewhere . I guess I wanted to say Natchez . In Memphis I went to the public library and found what they had to say about Natchez , more than I could find on Vicksburg , though all the books were about the war and some of the people found there . . . In New Orleans the rains were coming . That was before umbrellas were invented , I 'm told . I can 't tell you how she got there , but she did . Remember , she arrived long ago , long before Elvis . There was a monument to W . C . Handy instead . I thought it was in St . Louis . It was a long way I was glad she had gone . In our day it took a long time to get here from there . Now you can fly , but not like a bird . There is no such freedom in our provinces . She told her mother she planned to keep going . We could follow if we wished , but don 't expect her to take time to show us New Orleans . Ruby was delighted to hear we would be following her as far as New Orleans , her very own childhood dream city . First , there were the towns : Faulkner 's , Welty 's . In Vicksburg I remembered Reynolds was born here . I got it wrong somewhere , said Natchez : I guess I wanted to say Natchez . In Memphis I went to the public library and found what they had to say about Natchez , more than I could find on Vicksburg , though all the book s were about the war and some of the people found there . . . In New Orleans the rains were coming . That was before umbrellas were invented , I 'm told . Ruby had her child . A daughter she named Delia . Delia would marry but not Ruby , whose family was ruined by a man , a white man , whom she once loved . Never again , she swore . Ruby stayed put , helping her widowed mother stay alive , and reared her daughter the best any mother ever could . She was shunned by many who had known her since she was a baby , who knew the story of her and that Rich boy , how she 'd brought on her brother 's death , or so they saw it . She stayed in spite of it all . Delia did not . She was young when she walked away . Not because of her mother or grandmother . She had had her fill of the accusations , the taunts , the insults . Fathered by a white man , to be an embodiment of his memory , the very sight of her a reminder first to her mother , then to everyone who knew her family . . . the spawn of those for whom her uncle gave his life in an alley in Woolwine , Virginia , where if you know where to look and dig up enough dirt you may come to find underneath the carapace surface of that earth what remains of the death of her brother Rufus , and you may as well bury the hard - shelled , blade - wet ghost here , no one comes to look any longer , for once the light - blinding monster struck in the bright noon of the day there was no need any longer to look , let alone know where to look . Delia is gone . Her mother will never know where . The daughter wants to begin her life all over . She loves her life so much she must have more than she will ever find in this town that lies almost out of time , near to being lost in space . Wherever she goes , she remains a soft woman with her creamy skin alluring , but she has a mind that knows what to do to get where she is going . And there is no way to describe the route without following her , which may or may not happen , depending on her and the skill of the cartographer . No , I don 't mean what you think . She was half white but it was her dark skin she loved . She followed the lead of her mind instinctually , she followed its dictates , she found her place . Out there . This is something I have never been able to do , at least not to either myself or Cathleen 's satisfaction . I have memory , though . It is like Will Blake might have said ( but did not ) , So flies eternity 's sunrise when memory is the worm in the mind . We are all gathered , as I say . . . in various states of dress and undress . This is the room of what I remember , and it is not pretty , though much of it is beautiful just the same . There were so many mistakes , careless ones and those only a fool knows how to do and does what he can to fuck up the works of life . I have no faith . I may as well go to the devil . he feared it would become . . . If I were sleeping , it was as restless as a leg trapped in the pit of dreams . That is not what I saw , though . All around were the beloved in my life , beginning where love begins , always where we do not know when we are little what we are for and migrate from mother to lover with such ease we never want to be old , and here I am , asleep if not dead . . . Alas , I tip and recline upside down . I wanted all my old loves to be here , and only the new ones have appeared . Cathleen is not here , and she may not be , I do not know . I keep dreaming she finds another man in time to thwart my effort to keep her for myself , and I should know better , she says , and I have said , more than once , I agree . All is told and retold , foretold and recalled . Mnemonic devices fill the room . Everyone here has one . Because I do not believe in such things I scoff at the divulgence of strings of rawhide , pebbles with faces , pieces whose origins are known only to the bearer , for he or she is protector or protectress of their own time , their own skin , their own historical dreams . It is time to go . The feet rise . The legs move . I am hellbent on the door and going through it . Nobody here sees me go , they are in the service of others . And I am tired of being seen . He was dead by then . One brother was living . He had a photograph of Rich , Abe , and Dave with a slag heap in the background and a building miners entered to take the lift down to begin the working day and take it back up at day 's end . In the photo the brothers are dressed warmly . Rich is somber , wearing a cap with ear flaps , Abe looks very taciturn in his Sunday - type hat , Dave is bareheaded and smiling . They are all dressed for warmth , wearing coats . It must be winter at this coal - mining camp known as Mine 18 , later renamed for the Swedish nightingale Jenny Lind . My father was born here , where his family lives when they are not working as sharecroppers on a cotton farm in eastern Oklahoma . Here , south of Fort Smith , where I would be born how many years later . . . I don 't know now and I 'm not going to stop and figure out the number of years it takes before Abe is dead and then how many have elapsed since I met Dave in that Oklahoma home for the dying , I called it , what others dignify , and to this very day , as a so - called rest home . Rich was still alive somewhere when Abe was killed in Sallisaw by the two men and one woman who were drunk and armed and wanted to rob the house where my grandfather was caretaker for a friend who was out of town at the time . I do not know anything more about Rich , not yet . My grandmother talked very little about her late husband or his family , and then only to my mother , never to me . My uncle Clyde told me what little I know now , when I saw him on his ninety - first Halloween birthday . We arrived near noon and apparently were seen through the window , the door opening to his little apartment that gave onto an alley with the funeral home across the way . He said , chuckling ( his voice hoarse from too many cigarillos ) , I won 't have far to go . . . but he did not die as easily as he hoped to , he lay in a bed flat on his back hooked up with an oxygen tank , and finally , as I heard from his friend Katy , herself in her nineties by then but still fishing every morning as she would faithfully continue to do for another year or so until she too got sick and died several years after Clyde took his last breath ; or so I heard , all of it , from Katy 's daughter Norma , who worked with her husband at Tyson Foods and regaled us that Halloween day with tales of a working life no one should have to bear , especially at a well - known chicken emporium that already had a reputation for workers who had died unable to open the doors after a fire started inside . Shades of the Triangle Shirt Factory fire much earlier in the century . . . at least the toll was not so great and Tyson did not use up so much precious time on TV the news , let alone history , as that still - remembered horror in New York City . In Katy 's living room her other daughter , Blanche , sat with her black - skinned son , explaining briefly that he was the issue of a one - night stand or at least , as she added , only a few nights all told ; and she continually alluded to Loretta Lynn when Cathleen was talking about her piano / guitar - fiddle duets with my father , a self - taught musician who always asked me to sing and whom I always refused , only later - a quarter - century later - realizing I had a strong voice one day when I spuriously thought to ape Pavarotti in the open kitchen window where I was washing dishes on a warm summer day in a place infamous ( to mNo one knew what happened to Uncle Rich , my father said . Dave loved a good time and drank too much , and during one of the times his mother and father were separated he and one or two of his by - then - already four brothers would get to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches when he , or they , visited Abe . He could never understand why his father and mother acted the way they did , always splitting up and his mother always giving birth during the time his father was away , though there was never any question of who the child 's sire was . There were no stories of my grandmother ever leaving the cotton farm where they were cropping for shares when Abe left and the boys took over for him and then took his place following his death . And certainly there was never a word about another man in my grandmother 's life . Her mother was part Cherokee born and reared outside , but not far from , Tahlequah . There is a studio photograph of Pearl Taylor ( whose given name was Peralee ) when she was barely twenty . A year later she would marry Frank Clifft in a double wedding ceremony that included her sister Doll and Frank 's brother Jeff . My grandmother , Effie Clifft , was Pearl 's firstborn and her only child ; only a few years later , her second child was stillborn and she also died . There is a story , which I have never doubted because my grandmother , who was a mere child at the time said to her son that she was always in town with her mother and played outside the hotel while her mother was with that child 's father , who was not Frank Clifft but an itinerant musician for whom my father was named , Manuel Romain . Frank decided to leave once Pearl and the baby were buried in the same grave , they were so poor and Frank a habitue of Fort Smith 's Row , the city 's whorehouse district on the banks of the Arkansas River . But he did take Effie to live with Jeff and Doll , and their son Tom , before he disappeared . . . " Tom and I , " my grandmother would tell me , " were double cousins , closer than brother and sister . " Pearl 's mother was Scots and her name , like my father 's grandmother 's , was M atilda ; Matilda Satterfield . The Clifft family was Welsh . A Celtic - Cherokee strain . . . Years ago I noticed an apocryphal tale or two , or three or more , concerning the origins of this continent 's original inhabitants , but I have forgotten all but a memory trace that has little if anything to do with people whose name chalaqui translates " cave people . " Nothing to do with Twelve Lost Tribes from Anywhere . . . After her sons were gone , never to return home , Matilda Wood , Charles McAlexander 's widow , lived with her three daughters on the sorghum farm outside Woolwine . Rose was the first to marry , Sonia married next , and Carla , a wild girl , had two children but never married . Rose 's husband died in a coal mine explosion , Sonia 's drank himself to death . Although Rose bore one child , Sonia did not marry again and remained childless , and after the two husbands were gone all three daughters lived with their mother until she died , Matilda having been forced to give up smoking her corncob pipe only the year before . Someone asked me once why I considered the past important . I answered what must have seemed flippant : Because I remember . And truth be told , who does not ? This country is infamous , as we all know , for never wanting to get caught " living in the past , " and always forging ahead , into the fabled unknown , to make a new life when and wherever necessary . I have been guilty of the same infamy myself : born in Oklahoma Territory , where Fort Smith is separated by the Arkansas River from its Oklahoma banks , south of which lies Spiro with its storied burial mounds . After working for Boeing in Wichita during the war , a friend of my father talked him into accompanying him to a place in the Northwest named for the Yakima tribe , who has since changed the i in their name to a second a to go with the first and the third . I grew up in that country of fruit orchards - cherries , apricots , plums , pears , peaches , apples , and I worked them all , both as a picker and helping haul the boxfuls at the end of the day - and row crops , among them sugar beets and peas and asparagus , the only ones I worked firsthand ; and hops , which I quickly learned to avoid assiduously after realizing I was afflicted with a fear of heights , whether merely vertigo or something other , and during harvest you rode a machine twenty feet high , from which you still had to reach higher to make sure all of the hops strung high on their poles were picked before the trucks hauled them to be processed in the warehouse the farmer maintained to maximize his profits from the harvest , which year after year proved to be bountiful , the best - paying crop in that valley . I came of age on a farm , where my father worked on cars , trucks , tractors , and other progeny of Henry Ford ( a fascist genius of Charles Lindbergh 's generation of Nazi sympathizers ) , whose invention of the Model - T came at the crucial moment in my father 's life , when the man who owned the cotton farm bought a new one and gave my father 's family the used one ( he profited so from the crops grown and tended by his tenant farmer family ) . My father told me : " I 'd drive it up against a tree until it was high enough to get under and work on all day and I left it there if I had to , so I could start next time from where I 'd had to stop . " In addition to homesteading , building our house from the mere shell of a one - room shack set down , it seemed , in the middle of a rye field surrounded by a vineyard gone to hell for who knows how long , but soon to be joined by two other vineyards , my father , with his bricklayer friend Virgil Stephens , built a large , commercial automobile garage in his backyard , which became famous in the little town less than five miles away . I grew up milking cows and when I was not working out , which meant working for other people , I learned to care for all three Concord grape vineyards , from pruning in winter , then irrigation and cultivation during the spring and summer , to the harvest come early autumn . My first city was Seattle , and there I lived on a houseboat , with Cathleen , my lifelong love , or as she still likes to say , her " split - apart . " There , I began writing poetry and took it to show Theodore Roethke , who encouraged me to keep going , even asking me to stay another year to take his verse - writing workshop , but I needed money to pay a hospital bill , and he so identified with my dilemma he wrote a letter of recommendation that got me a job in my first town - my parents ' Arkansas home was in the country , about a mile outside the town of Greenwood with a thick forest of pine behind the house , which lay uphill and a pasture away from Clyde and Effie 's house . My next town , where I worked full time as an editor and prose writer for a university , was Pullman , in wheat country only a few miles west of Idaho and roughly an hour south of the state 's second largest city , Spokane , where Cathleen was born and where , after spurning her mother 's wishes that she go to college nearby , with her father 's blessing - her parents always at war with one another , she still says , a half - century later - she left to go to Seattle , where she was confined to a women 's dormitory when I returned to free her a few days after my twenty - first birthday and a month and a half before she turned eighteen . From there I went to San Francisco , and from there with Cathleen to New York City , soon moving to live in western Massachusetts , and finally Albuquerque , from whence we came to what seems to me still more a frontier outpost and hence more town than city ( and certainly not a part of its countryside of lakes and forests ) even though it has been dubbed , by the local chamber of commerce ( or some such nefarious entity ) , as " First City on the Mississippi ; yet I doubt Mark Twain ever mentioned a place this far north as the origin of his beloved river originated , where in fact its headwaters were discovered by a man named Henry Rowe Schoolcraft , honored by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his Hiawatha poem where the Ojibwe became , by sFriends say , You 've told this story over and over . What does it have to do with whatever art you may someday possess ? They know the answer as well as I : Poetry I have always wanted to make a new kind of prose , richer than the so - called prose poems of either Aloysius Bertrand or Charles Baudelaire , the latter more truly my teacher than the wondrous Roethke , who died not long after I moved to Pullman to take the job I had not even had time to thank him for . I have never been to Paris , however , and at seventy - two and , as I write , recovering from surgery , I will probably never see Balzac 's city , which I , in fact , deem more Jeanne Duvall 's than her flaneur paramour 's . But what of that ? I have lived a lifetime in each of the places I have named , and not ignoring my birthplace , where I have often thought of returning to live before I die , for there are , indeed , questions I have as yet no inkling of an answer for , such as Why was an only son born to parents who came from dirt - poor Southern origins and worked themselves to the very lip of the grave and over with their only hope of being remembered left in the hands of their son who , God willing , as my mother would say ( my father never mentioning religion except to erupt occasionally , " Get thee behind me , Satan ! " and invariably when his Sundays were interrupted by one of the many born - again ' rs living around him ) . . . God willing , her son would reach old age someday already possessing , they prayed , the modicum of art necessary to tell the story of their lives and all those to whom they were connected , and tell it so that the writer would read it and rewrite it until the day he could write finis both to his book and to his life . Her name , Ruby . There would be another Ruby in Arkansas , with whom Abe 's fourth oldest child , Clyde , would make a boy child , Dale Roy with his mother 's surname to keep his very existence from Abe 's widow , Clyde 's mother , with whom he lived after his father was murdered in Sallisaw and once four of his brothers were in the war and a fifth , the only one with a child , was working in Boeing 's war effort in Wichita . The widow , their mother , knowing of her son 's bastard child , would have torn her clothes and fled into the pine trees and mourned with fireflies , who are ordinarily believed to be celebrating the dark for they are so rapid to appear and dart through the black night to appear elsewhere a moment later . There she would have stayed until dawn and walking naked into her house she knew the first burden , the first task , was to put down the bucket in the backporch well and haul up water , then wash her body and let it drip dry on the cobblestones . Ruby of Woolwine , Virginia , came to Richard and let him fuck her , then she started beating him with a fallen branch and he protected his privates rather than risk worse . She was naked too , but she knew what she wanted . She wanted him gone , but only after she 'd made sure he 'd given her another child , for this time she needed the child to live and be by her side so as long as she lived she might remember both her brother 's madness and her lover 's hatred . She went home and waited for the funeral . She wanted to go where they played music for funerals and celebrated lives rather than weeping for them . She would never go there now . The constable listened to her . She was wearing a gingham dress she had made herself . She wept in front of him , and her tears were not feigned , simply held inside her body so long they accompanied her words perfectly and therefore choked her as she laid forth her indictment of Richard . She saw the man 's face contract , blood drain from his skin . She told him everything and that is why the man heard enough to be convinced her brother 's killer was her own lover , the father of what she said would now be two children , one aborted and one to live as long as she and even longer , she hoped , for she never wanted her brother to be forgotten . Rufus , her brother 's name , though she called him Charles , his middle name and the name of Richard 's late father , gunned down in the doorway of his neighbor 's house , a shotgun fired into his back by a man drunk with moonshine and just having put up a headstone for his own dead father , demanded Charles take a drink with him and when Charles started out the door the man took his shotgun from the wall and blew both barrels into the back of the father of Richard , Abraham , David , and Ira , and their three sisters , Sonia , Rose , and Carla . There is no record of the neighbor 's name . Matilda , Charles 's widow , would never utter that name again . She had seen too much death after she was orphaned that way in the war , still a child and just having learned to walk , she walked away from the burning house of her dead mother and father and made her way to a house where she could grow up and if not there then another house whose inhabitants might either know her kin or have work she could do to earn her bed and board , her " keep . " He would never pay the full price . His mother and three brothers led him away in the dark . Or he led them , but left his mother where she stayed with her three daughters , with whom she would live out her life now and perhaps eventually find some ease from the torment she had never been free from since she 'd learned to walk . Richard did repent but never confessed to anyone his feelings . In his own mind he saw his entire family avenged by what he had done . It was like the four years of the war had simply continued after Appomattox inside his body , which felt gnarled and misshapen like a hanging tree or a fetus whose life bore his trace as well as Ruby 's , having joined as though preordained by Lee handing his sword to Grant , and only memory would swear what all there was and would ever be of one life that might eventually vindicate the first death . Nothing could be done now , she had aborted , her brother was dead , all Rich had were his reasons , which didn 't make sense . He remembered her beauty . He did not even know she had a family , that 's how struck down he was upon meeting her , she was solemn , tall for her age - still young , much younger than him - and a black body he romanticized calling it " onyx , " that he could not forget even after he bade her goodbye that day and woke in the night hard with desire and the need to quench his thirst for her . She happened to be in town the next day , when he also happened to be there , though he rarely went to town in successive days , at least until , but after two days a third was called for and on the fourth they found a place outside town where he peeled her dress from you , she had nothing underneath , nor did he wear anything there and she smiled when she saw his member rigid , even seeming to move as though it were dowsing for her entrance . Each day after that he came to town and they met out here , as though by assignation , rolling together in the high grass that was warm and layered and a good place to sleep after their bodies were spent , happy , and she told him she wanted only to leave this place , she knew it would be hard if not impossible to get from here to where she wanted to go , where there were women like her who had ambition and desire and sought their consummation . Where is that ? he asked , but she didn 't answer , just pointed and said , Out there . . . He wanted to take her . He was surprised he loved her . A white man was forbidden to love a black woman , even if a black man loving a white woman were grounds for immediate execution . . . what , after all , had the war been about if not to keep black people slaves , obedient to whites who were taught they were saved because there was a race of people who belonged below their own station , and no wonder , poor whites were such trash in the sight of those who owned more land that their only recourse was to denigrate the black person in the effort to think better oThen her brother learned of their trysts , he would not say love , and for some reason he did not want to admit what was so obvious that no one need tell him more than his sister , who did not trust him anyway , he was so headstrong and full of hate . She went to a woman on the outskirts of Woolwine who concocted a brew and after several weeks of drinking it down each night - during which time she never saw nor heard from the father of her fetus - the misshapen thing was purged with the help of the woman and that was all . His name she knew , and for that very reason . Her lover would not tell her his own , nor would she tell him her name as long as he preferred anonymity , knowing , she thought , he would break his silence once they were gone from here and were living " out there . " Her brother went to town and every chance he had he seized upon the opportunity to stalk Abraham through the Woolwine streets , taunting him mercilessly , keeping on him until the boy got close to his other brothers reaching safety for that stay in town . Rich told Abraham nothing about the brother or his sister . She came to him one day and led him to their place and told him the baby was gone . Could they make plans to go now ? Rich told her what her brother was doing to his brother . She dismissed it and sought to take the conversation back to where she had hoped it would go . . . Where do you want to go ? When ? How will we travel ? What will we do when we find a place we want to live ? Are you sure this is what you want ? Aren 't you afraid of being seen with me , of people knowing we share not only the same house but the same bed , eat together , talk and laugh together . . . as though we were one , as though we belonged with one another , as though love were possible even between such as you and me . . . but she did not get back , he was too aflame , burning with rage at her brother , telling her how close he was to his little brother and what he had to do now to make her brother end his crazed pursuit . Nothing could be done now , she had aborted , her brother was dead , all Rich had were his reasons , which didn 't make sense , even to him once he was done . He remembered her beauty . At first he did not even know she had a family , that 's how struck he was by her , she was solemn , tall for her age - still young , much younger than him - and her black skin he romanticized by calling it " onyx , " and he forgot nothing after he bade her goodbye that day and woke in the night hard with desire and the need to pull her to him , realizing then he was dreaming . She happened to be in town the next day , when he also happened to be there , though he rarely went to town on successive days , at least until now , when after two days a third was called for and on the fourth they found a place outside town where he peeled away her dress , nothing underneath , nor did he wear anything there and she smiled when she saw his member rigid , even seeming to move as though dowsing to enter her . Each day after that he came to town and they met out there , as though by assignation , rolling together in the high grass that was warm and layered and a good place to sleep after their bodies were spent , happy , and she told him she wanted only to leave this place , she knew it would be hard if not impossible to get from here to where she wanted to go , where there were women like her who had ambition and desire and sought such consummation . Where is that ? he asked , but she didn 't answer , just pointed and whispered , Out there . . . He wanted to take her there . He was surprised he loved her . A white man was forbidden to love a black woman , even if a black man loving a white woman led to his immediate execution . . . what , after all , had the war been about if not to keep black people slaves , obedient to whites who were taught they were saved because there was a race of people who belonged below their own station , and no wonder , poor whites were so much trash in the sight of those who owned so much land that their only recourse was to denigrate black people Then her brother learned of their trysts , he would not say " love , " and for some reason he did not want to admit what was so obvious that no one need tell him more than his sister , who feared him when he got so headstrong and full of hate . She went to a woman on the outskirts of Woolwine who concocted a brew and after several weeks of drinking it down each night - during which time she never saw nor heard from the father of her fetus - the misshapen thing was purged with the help of the woman and that was all there was . Her lover told her Abraham 's name , but he would not tell her his own , nor would she tell him her name as long as he preferred anonymity , believing they would break their silence once they were gone from here and were living " out there . " Her brother went to town and every chance he had he stalked Abraham through the Woolwine streets , taunting him mercilessly , keeping on him until he reached his brothers and once there was safe until his next trip to town . Rich told Abraham nothing about the brother or his sister . She came to Rich one day and led him to their place and told him the baby was gone . Could they make plans to leave now ? Rich told her what her brother was doing to his brother . She said he got crazy , he 'd get over it , don 't worry , and she sought to take the conversation back to . . . Where do you want to go ? When ? How will we travel ? What will we do when we find a place we want to live ? Are you sure this is what you want ? Aren 't you afraid of being seen with me , of people knowing we share not only the same house but the same bed , eat together , talk and laugh together . . . as though we were one , as though we belonged with one another , as though love were possible between you and me . . . but she did not get back there , he was too aflame , burning with rage at her brother , telling her how close he was to his little brother and what he must do now , namely , make her brother end his crazed mission . They planned to meet again , but it was too late , her brother was adamant , and so was Abraham 's older brother , so was she . . . She told him she needed him only because she loved him . He lost control , told her she was nothing , nor was her brother , or any of those from whom they came : read Genesis , he said , you know who betrayed Noah , don 't you ? I was not there . Manuela Roma was . Reynolds , certainly : " I was in Lecumberri . ' I was the man , I suffered , I was there . ' " I 've already gone back there so many times I may never be sure I will ever be rid of it . ( And why would I want that ? ) It sets off the highway through the Blue Ridge from the North Carolina border to Roanoke and on to the Shenandoah . Woolwine . All I remember now is the way the church looked in the falling snow . The rest is like a blackout of history - too much imbibing on the succulent tit of the package store across the street , only to wake as alone as before you started out , unable to recall the slide of flesh into flesh when the body was glazed with the other 's hands and fingers and kisses and the moment toward redemption , you knew , had begun , and who knew why the only woman you loved so long was never your own ? But I started out where I did not go until I was too old to live there . The Blue Ridge . You see out where you can get a view of things how the mountains look blue and hazy as far as your eyes can take the brain , which does need to remember and for that there are tourist pictures , which are totally cliche but give you an idea of what you saw once and therefore could never think of without missing . I lie awake with her . Then I sleep and wake with her gone but my little cock is no longer thick or as long as before , but shriveled , the feel of her lips still girdling it , and I touch myself and recall her suddenness . How could I love any woman after her ? The gods know I wanted to , but no , the heavens would never be so aligned there was nothing to be done but bring her body back to you to slake your hunger for her , sate your thirst for her , though a slaked thirst bore upon you until your body grew so hungry it devoured her need and somehow replaced it with your own , so much that the doors of the night closed and the windows opened and there you were back in the snow of the mountains , down by the little church , waiting for what you 'd heard could happen here when those with snakes in baskets arrived and began saying the words that spelled either salvation or death . Juan thinks : What am I doing , writing about Adore what I don 't know and what she only said once or twice . . . He 's been holed up in his mother 's house on St . Charles , Peggy assured him the run of the place , girls and all . He doesn 't want to do anything more here than sleep , he can go to see Adore if he needs more , and yes , he does , he has the feel of need between his legs , but then , when was it ever elsewhere , or otherwise ? I could see him from where I normally , these days , would be at The Saloon , time to raise the metal door and set up for tourists and locals alike . But not now , even though Young Jackson took a trip to the Mississippi Gulf Coast to see relatives working the casinos and he 's promised me he 'll split with me the cache of winnings he says , I 'm sure to bring back , but I have other things to consider , Roberto , Lelli , for instance - she can 't go back to Greece now that her country 's falling apart and she wants to stay here , at least until Mardi Gras is over . She has the papers that deed over to her the Mill Valley house , which , of course , she 's never seen , Roberto having shared it the last twenty years , before moving here , with the woman of whom he came to declare , " We had nothing in common , finally . " I promised Lelli a day or so after the funeral I 'd accompany her to California and help her decide what to do with the Marin County place . I 've told her it 's a beautiful house and as near San Francisco as she would need it to be , but she knows her own mind by now , she 's a fierce though diminutive Greek with large breasts for such a little lady , and great humor the one or two times she was under me , yet she knows I know how determined she can be , for example , how she refused to be with me after she returned from Athens and found me with she who later stole my Bible and eloped returning to Honolulu , where later I looked but didn 't find either her or that revised standard version I still don 't know why she wanted to borrow , but she did , and the same night said she wanted a baby , and when I left without commitment , as usual , she called and said her old flame from Hawaii had just sold a novel , was coming to New York to sign the papers , and she had told him yes , she wanted to see him , it would only be for part of a day and she 'd call when he was gone . A week later she called and wept on the phone , or almost , she was too tough to let herself go that far , and didn 't mention the Bible , only that she waI go down early and Peggy , who 's always up and about , feeds me breakfast , usually bacon and eggs , orange juice and coffee , and French bread ; she believes in your standard norteamericano meal , especially when it 's only for one , and particularly when I 'm the one , she knows I 'm not French and being part Spanish doesn 't mean I 'm not into the kind of food my great uncle Ira loved , the kind of meal Adore says she had to let him teach her how to rustle up . . . I go upstairs again and write until I begin hearing the girls in the house and usually the morning has turned into noon . I have wasted most of my time up here , though . I sought to write about her child 's body 's initiation with a man 's . But not now , in fact maybe never if something should happen between now and then , and no , he doesn 't know what . . . Adore at her age is happier with him in her bed than anyone 's ever been , Irish Cathleen included , and he could go on , but why bother ? He 's a freak of culture . His culture . No wonder Ira never bothered going back to Woolwine , he knew the limitations he had lived with until leaving there , and he wanted nothing more to do with his brothers , nor did he care to try to track them down in Fort Smith , they were probably holed up in some burg in the sticks . New Orleans was good for Ira , no doubt , made a musician of him , and with his music he had a free pass into the city 's open arms . And now it was me . I knew I had a story to tell about him too : the old American tale that never ends , black men and white men , which in this story includes the overwhelming presence of a black woman even though she 's either mulatto or octoroon , she never found out for sure . . . A black man died in Virginia and one of the white men who fled as fugitive with his three brothers left them in Memphis and one night fell in love with a black woman in New Orleans before he died , and when I met her , while Ira was still alive , though not for much longer , just long enough for me to see how a man and a woman from the master and slave cultures could love one another like any lovely body from , say , the same culture . I hate the word culture , but that 's my fault , I never found out early enough in life about that son of a wolf bitch in Nazi Germany - whoever he was , no matter what he was called - said , " When I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver , " and anyway , it doesn 't matter , my heart has room only for one love at a time , and high falutin ' cultural concerns are for other timSo here I go . I walk by the river a while , sit down and try to think where I 'm going to go next with this tale I 've lived all my life to be able to feel like I 'm ready to begin , let alone take to its denouement , and I think about the people from who knows where walking by , and wonder if they know what it 's like to be from the very bloodstream that flows through the people whose only home is here , coursing like a rip tide through a body once you learn , as she did , and as she has tried to teach me , how the loas sound when they speak through you and how you feel before and after , let alone while the miracle is happening . And that 's what happens between waking at Madame Peggy 's , in my mama 's brothel and leaving Adore 's . . . I 'm able to get over here and do some work in The Saloon . You see , my man Roosevelt came back around the time of Roberto 's funeral and is filling in for Young Jackson now ; otherwise I 'd have to beat it over here and do the opening and setting up and get the working day going by myself , and thanks to the gods Roosevelt came back after leaving his son with his folks and returning to find his wife dead up on Canal , victim of the man who hired her to strip and do street jobs albeit in the back room when she wasn 't on stage . Roosevelt long ago decided he wanted to live more than get revenge , but he came back here just in case he changed his mind .