LITMIR.BIZ

      In the distance the patrol approaches at port arms, in a line of skirmishers, Teutonic, in search of Celts. Their eyes burn with murder. Their pace is deliberate and unceasing. Yet, it is I who have found them and not the reverse, and they are the sign that I am not at home. I do not share their fondness for kartoffels.

*[Interviewer’s Note to the Reader: Here Junior Ray rose from his chair and walked into the hallway where he went to a door behind and beneath the staircase, the usual location of the steps leading to a basement, but there are almost no basements in Delta dwellings, for, indeed, they are already in one. He opened the door to a deep if not large closet; then, standing on the threshold, he bent over, rummaged about briefly but noisily and hauled forth an enormous light-tan canvas hunting coat, of which not only the game pockets but the coat itself—buttoned up and bound into a bundle with lengths of cotton rope—bulged and strained at every stitch and seam with the weight of what appeared to be angular objects. He lifted the grotesque and bloated garment from the floor of the closet with both hands and carried it with him back to his chair in the living room where he dropped the swollen coat upon the floor between our two chairs. This odd package contained Shaw’ notebooks.

      From a sitting position, Junior Ray, as though thrusting his bold hand into the jaws and uncertain darkness of a sleeping catfish, reached and grabbed and tossed, one by one, each of the notebooks at my feet until the heap stood at the height of my knees.

      The notebooks themselves were not actually notebooks: they were ledgers, a plentiful supply of which had been available to Shaw in the almost empty and long-unused plantation commissary that still stands even today in slow decay on land once owned by Shaw’s great-grandfather on his mother’s side, Captain Pemberton Whitworth Ferry, a native of North Carolina, who had obtained land in the Delta in the 1840s and had moved, at first, his family to Carrollton just up in the Hills, then, later, after the Civil War, had moved them, finally, down into the Delta’s fertile alluvial jungle.

      I picked up one of the ledgers, thought briefly of Thomas Wolfe, and opened it to the first page. I quickly examined the contents of that page and that of several more. A rapid survey of the pile confirmed my impression that every page of each book was completely filled, back and front—in pencil. Shaw’s handwriting was atrocious but quite readable. And that was a great relief.]

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       The Silo — The Search for Shaw — The Hopping Man — Niggas & Planters — Miss Helena Ferry — Disappearing Footprints — Mr. X and the Light-Skinned Miss Atlanta Birmingham Jackson