Sugar Land by tammy lynne stoner

Author:tammy lynne stoner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Published: 2018-12-07T16:00:00+00:00

THE KING OF THE TWELVE-STRING GUITAR

The week the Warden died, in the fall of 1949, I was paging through the paper to make sure they had listed his obituary correctly when I came across a blurb on page three: Lead Belly, Former Central Unit Inmate, Strums a Low Note.

The article told how Huddie had built himself quite a name with folks like Woody Guthrie raving about his musical skill. The crazy Negro—he had made himself a reputation as a musical genius.

The focus of the article, though, was how Huddie had contracted ALS, or what had come to be known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. The short of it: Huddie—the self-proclaimed and widely acknowledged “King of the Twelve-String Guitar”—was dying.

Well, shit.

I closed the paper right up. It was too much. I had just buried the Warden. And to add to it, I felt like I’d lost my entire family. Mama and Daddy were long gone, and my stepdaughters had turned their grief inside themselves, far away from me. Since the Warden died, I had sat in our home night after night having silent dinners with his daughters, the ones who didn’t want my condolences—or maybe I was too lost in my own gray world to hand them out.

Huddie dying? I couldn’t manage that right now, so I set the paper aside until I felt strong enough to handle it.

The next day, I opened it up again. The article called Huddie—Lead Belly—“one of the most prolific folk singers of the day, and also one of the most violent,” having landed himself in jail for attempted murder or stabbing at least three times. It said that a few years after his first album came out, the doctors told him he had ALS, and that he would die from it:

. . . Lead Belly’s symptoms include tripping on stairs and, to his heartbreak, a decreased ability to make quick, accurate chord changes. Now, he’s bedridden in New York City, with some difficulty swallowing due to muscle weakness . . .

I flipped the paper down and pushed my plate of spaghetti to the side of my gold TV tray. Two loud birds chirped at each other outside. I looked out across my small room. A force of blood moved through me with each breath I took.

The thought of my friend lying there, possibly alone, in bed, not able to play or sing, surged through my already damaged heart and broke it down even further. The Warden, God bless him, had left me a nice sum of money on his death, and I decided autumn might be a really beautiful time to visit New York City.

× × ×

The very next morning, me feeling deeply that he didn’t have much time left, I woke the Warden’s girls and asked them to have some coffee with me. Miss Debbie, her hair in curlers under a cotton hankie, said she didn’t drink coffee—that it made her too aggressive.

“Oh, is that what does it?” I said.

She answered by putting a pillow over her face.

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