Flash Fictions from Web Del Sol


REVIVAL

Robert Hill Long

      Any sharecropper can give you half the history of the south in two verses of delta blues. The rest he hums, squatting to roll a cigarette in the shade of his mule. History is the yellowed newspapers that insulate his bedroom and livingroom and kitchen, which are the same room. Steak was 37 cents a pound, hamburger 24 cents--that's how the city talked about itself. Out here a string of fish cost a handful of worms and a dozen mosquito bites. A good pointing dog could fill his coat pockets with quail. He had a bush full of hen-eggs, two hogs a year, all the work he could bear. Saturday night blues, Sunday gospel.

      Hitler? bad news far away. He'll tell you his overseer was worse because he was mean right here, daylight to dark, every day. The man wore yellow riding pants though he drove the property in a no-door truck; kept a pencil-lead mustache, hated getting dirty. His jowls swelled red and purple when black men talked back, when they threw down cotton sacks to catch a freight to Chicago. The week of the A.M.E. Zion revival he drove off the levee. When his drowning was confirmed the revivalists started a slow spiritual, but as it speeded up there was no hiding what all the clapping was for. Even the catfish and hushpuppies tasted better that night.

      Any sharecropper can tell you: one bad white man with land can spoil it for a whole parish. He holds out his cigarette hand with its scarred pink palm: like a goddam infected splinter, he swears. He's never met a white who'd do a black man much good, but the land bank's white and he--he knows how to keep his peace. Too much shouting and stealing in cities, north or south. No wood thrush song to make darkness holy--just big trucks rumbling everyone awake before dawn, after midnight.

      Out here he keeps a clean-swept yard, a chinaberry tree and a cane chair to pull up under it. His black and tan hound can fetch up a rabbit to fatten the stew, can lay it right at your feet. The hound gets up off the cool chinaberry dirt and stretches, eyeing you. Are you staying to eat? Two fields over, his brother's wife lets the screen door wheeze and slap behind her. In the reddening air she raises her head, hollers Supper!


Click on the right arrow below and go to next page