Read DR13 - Last Car to Elysian Fields for Free Online

guitar he'd carry to all the dances. If a man could be pretty, that was Junior."
    "How'd he end up in Angola?"
    "Didn't fit. Not in white people's world, not in black people's world. Junior had his own way. Didn't take his hat off to nobody. He'd walk five miles befo' he'd sit in the back of the bus. Back in them days, a black man like that wasn't gonna have a long run."
    Tripod was struggling in my arms and kicking at me with his feet. I set him down and looked at the fireflies lighting in the trees. The air was cool and breathless, the surface of the bayou layered with steam. An electrically powered boat hung with lanterns was passing through the corridor of oaks that lined the banks. Batist's attitudes on race were not conventional ones. He never saw himself as a victim, nor did he ever act as the apologist for black men who were forced into lives of crime, but by the same token he never told less than the truth about the world in which he'd grown up. So far I could not determine where he stood on Junior Crudup.
    "It started at a dance at the beginning of the Depression," he said.
    "Junior was about t'irteen or fo'teen years old, working in a band for a black man had the most beautiful voice you ever heard. They was playing in a white juke by Ville Platte, on a real hot night, the place burning up inside. The singer, the man wit' the beautiful voice, he was playing the piano and singing at the same time, sweat pouring down his face. A white woman come off the dance flo' and patted her handkerchief on his brow. That's all she done. That's all she had to do.
    "After the juke closed up, five white men drunk on moonshine caught the singer out on the road and beat him till he couldn't get off the ground. But that wasn't enough for them, no. They was in an old Ford, one wit' them narrow tires, and they run the tire right acrost his t'roat and busted his windpipe. Man never sung again and died in the asylum. Junior seen it all, right there on the side of the road, and couldn't do nothing about it. I don't t'ink there was a person in the whole round world he trusted after that."
    "Why'd he go to the joint, Batist?"
    "Got caught sleeping wit' a white man's wife. That was 1934 or '35. But you want to know what happened in there, we got to talk to Hogman."
    "Batist, I'd really like to keep this simple."
    "They put Junior Crudup on the Red Hat Gang. Every nigger in Lou'sana feared that name, Dave. The ones come off it wasn't never the same."
    Hogman Patin was a big, powerful man, an ex-con musician who had done time at the old camps in Angola with Robert Pete Williams, Matthew Maxey, and Guitar Git-and-Go Welch. His arms were coal black and laced with pink scars from a half dozen knife beefs inside the prison system. Now he ran a cafe in St. Martinville, appeared once a year at the International Music Festival in Lafayette, and sold scenic postcards with his signature on them for a dollar a piece. Batist and I sat with him in his side yard, a mile up the bayou, while he threw scrap wood on a fire and told us about Junior Crudup and the Red Hat Gang.
    "See, Junior run the first year he was on the farm. Gunbull put a half cup of birdshot in his back, but he whipped a mule into the water and held onto its tail till it swum him all the way acrost the Miss'sippi," Hogman said, flinging a board into the fire, the sparks fanning across the bayou's surface. "A young white doctor on the other side picked the shot out of his back and tole Junior he had a choice he'd give Junior ten dollars and forget he was there or the doctor would carry him on back to the penitentiary.
    "Junior said, "They'll whup me with the black Betty if I go back."
    "The doctor say, "No, they ain't. I'm gonna make sure they ain't."
    "The doctor carried him on back to the farm and tole the warden he was gonna come see Junior every mont', and if Junior was whupped, the doctor was gonna have the warden's job.
    "When Junior come out of the infirmary, they sent him to the Red