SOURCE: "Last Fair Deal Gone Down," in Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. 30, No. 2, 1991, pp. 323-33.

The drug dealer is my age but broke and black and missing two fingers. He wants to do business but I want to hear about growing up poor in Greenville, Mississippi; we end up just driving around town in the heat of the day. After a while he says he owes too much money to be just sittin' around talking. I don't believe him—who ever heard of a broke drug dealer?—but I take him to his old neighborhood to pay off one of the debts. The kid he owes spots him a block away and chases the car on foot down the street. I pull over and my friend jumps out and hands over nine dollars, a good-faith payment on two hundred, then slaps some hands and gets back inside.

"I got to get out of this business," he says. "But I don't even have a dollar."

We drive around some more as the sun sets and the afternoon cools off. People are filling the street corners and front porches in loose gangs, family groups. I ask him when crack hit the little towns of the Mississippi Delta. He says a few years back.

"It's everywhere," he says somberly. "I won't say I'll never do it again because I don't want to lie; but someday I will clean myself up. I know the Lord does not visit a defiled temple."

"Do you know Booba Barnes?" I ask. Booba (his real name is Roosevelt; Booba comes from booby-trap, spelled phonetically from a Southern accent) is a local musician who I interviewed about blues in the Delta.

"Yeah I know Booba," he says.

"Why don't you get a job? Booba says there's lots of jobs."

"Look," he says, getting not quite unfriendly but suddenly very serious. "I did have a job. I grew up working in the cotton fields for twenty dollars a day. Don't tell me about nojob."

The Delta starts in Greenwood, Mississippi. Route 82 humps through the rolling country to the east and then, bang, tumbles out of the hills on a last downgrade and the Delta spreads out before you, flat, hazy, fertile. I'm here to research blues singer Robert Johnson, who died mysteriously in 1938 at the very pinnacle of his career. He wrote many of the classic blues songs—"Crossroads Blues," "Love In Vain," "Dust My Broom"— and mastered the slide guitar as no one had before. He was recorded once in a hotel in San Antonio, Texas, and once above a Buick showroom in the same town. Forrest Gander has written a collection of verse about him. Johnson was playing in a Greenwood juke joint when someone, probably a jealous husband, killed him with a drink of poisoned whiskey. He was 27. Rumor had it he made a deal with the Devil in return for his unheard-of wizardry on the guitar ("Hello Satan, I believe it's time to go …" he sang in "Me and the Devil Blues"); rumor also had it he spent his last hours crawling around the juke joint yard in agony, barking like a dog.

Greenwood is shadowless and still in the midday sun, a hot wind blowing that has been blowing for days. It is one of the towns where Johnson is supposed to have been buried and I am here to look for his grave. I am not the first to look and I certainly don't expect to find it—or even want to find it. Try to love the questions themselves, as the poet Rilke said. Mississippi's sharecroppers' shacks and lonely crossroads don't give up their secrets easily and I eventually realize that the importance is in the search itself. No pile of bones could teach me more about this land than die places I have been to find them. Bones, after all, are just bones; but myths live forever. Or for as long as one needs them to.

Local history is written all over the streets of the town: Cotton Street, River Road. I park in front of the Greenwood library and go in through the double glass doors. The building is over-air-conditioned like every modern building in the Soum. I ask the young woman at the front desk for the whereabouts of the Three Forks Cemetery. She says she doesn't know.

"Who's buried there, anyway? People have been here looking for that cemetery before," she says.

I tell her about Johnson. The story seems to ring a bell. She rummages around in the vertical file for a few minutes and comes up with a typed letter from the "Cemeteries" folder, dated July, 1988. "To the best of our knowledge no one has found the grave of Robert Johnson," the letter reads; "although we believe that he is buried near Morgan City, MS—some say at the Four Corners Cemetery near a highway."

The Four Corners Cemetery is a desolate piece of land near an old wooden church at a crossroads and I have been there—there is no grave for Robert Johnson, just a dozen handmade headstones sticking up at angles from the long grass. I tell the librarian this and, to get rid of me, she sends me to the Town Hall.

It's lunch hour and the Town Hall is nearly empty. I eventually find several older women in the Clerk's Office, all of whom recognize Robert Johnson's name. Some have even dealt with out-of-towners like me. One thinks the place I'm looking for might be near the junction of the Yazoo River and the Yalobusha River, just west of town ("There's an old church and a cemetery and a whole, you know … black thing down there," she says).

Then another woman gets the director of the local funeral home on the phone. He can tell me where the place is—he has, he says, encountered this question before. I take careful notes and soon I'm back in my car, crossing the Yalobusha, heading west.

The cemetery, when I finally find it, is pretty much what I expect: a half-dozen graves under a big shade tree at a T-intersection in the road. Nearby is an old farm and a scatter of shacks and rusting machinery. There's not a soul in sight and no sound except the birds and the hot May wind. James Horton, 1943-1974, reads one stone. Mother Ellen Freeman, 1899-1977, says another. Johnson's grave, I realize, could just as easily be in this cemetery as any of the hundreds like it in the Delta. He roamed from Ontario, Canada, to Texas (often at a moment's notice; one fellow performer recalls Johnson leaving in the middle of a song and the man didn't see him again for weeks) and the fact that we can't find his remains is, ultimately, just an extension of the man.

I get back in my car, thinking about things in this new light, and head for Oxford, the next stop in this land where Johnson learned and sang his blues.

Oxford is the home of Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi, the last bastion of the Old South. The sons and daughters of many "Delta Planters," as they are called, prepare for life among the university's grand brick buildings and sweeping lawns. Sorority sisters are "dropped, pinned and engaged," by fraternity brothers—a three-step courtship that sounds more like a gear mechanism than something that would happen to a young woman. Among other worthy things, Ole Miss is the location of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, Living Blues Magazine, and the Blues Archives.

The Center for the Study of Southern Culture is in a once-elegant wooden house that now has holes in the porch and shutters that hang off their hinges. It would be an appropriate place for a blues archives but I am directed across the street to the second floor of a much larger, more imposing building. The woman in charge there laughs and says, "Oh, something new," when I ask her for the folder on Robert Johnson. Others, obviously, have been here before me—many British musicians digging up their roots, says the woman. She also tells me that a journalist from Jackson, Mississippi, spent a year trying to find Johnson's grave before finally giving up.

"The grave's probably just jungle by now," she says. "Blacks here often just put a wooden marker on a grave, or the paper card provided by the funeral home. Those things don't last."

I sit down at a long table with the Robert Johnson folder, several books on the man, and a 1986 issue of Rolling Stone Magazine that published arare photograph of him. I look at the photograph for a long time. I see a cocky, handsome young man with closely-cut hair and two cigarettes hanging out of his mouth. He wears a pressed white shirt and suspenders, and the tell-tale cataract is clearly visible in his right eye. Thrust across the frame of the camera is the neck of his guitar, and a portion of the body. Clamped to the neck—in a chord that no guitarist I know can identify—is one graceful, elongated, spidery hand.

Johnson's Mississippi Delta is a two-hundred mile swath of flood-plain whose rich alluvial deposits and plentiful rainfall make it perfect for growing cotton. It was first settled in the 1830s and largely farmed by slaves until Reconstruction, when a sharecropping system developed that amounted to little more than serfdom for the local blacks. Today the poverty is crushing: Unemployment in some counties is as high as 18 percent, and the number of working farms has dropped by a factor of five since 1960. (The size of the average farm, however, has gone up by a factor of four; in other words, only the big operations survive). Technology has eliminated many of the field labor jobs, and "white flight" has drained the local towns of resources and capital.

For all the poverty, or perhaps because of it, music welled up from the rich Delta soil like so much crude oil. Sharecroppers played the one string—a piece of wire strung between two nails on a cabin wall. Itinerant musicians were brought out to the plantations on weekends to play for the fieldhands. Young hopefuls like Johnson cut their teeth on rough-and-tumble juke joints where drinks were served in tin cups to keep injuries at a minimum. Playing the juke joints offered an alternative to farm work but it could also—for Johnson, crawling around on his hands and knees outside a shack in a Greenwood cotton field while the dancing continued inside—exact a terrible price.

Johnson began his musical career innocently enough, watching old masters such as Charlie Patton and Son House play at the Saturday plantation parties. He would borrow their guitars when they went on break and, as he was far from accomplished, endure their ridicule. Then at age 19 he suddenly disappeared from the Robinson ville area. The story goes that he showed up a year later at a club in Banks, Mississippi, where Son House and Willie Brown were playing. He asked if he could sit in and the two musicians agreed, assuming Johnson was just going to embarrass himself. He didn't. House and Brown listened, slack-jawed, as Johnson conjured up from his guitar some of the most advanced playing they had ever heard.

"Robert came along with the walking bass, the boogie bass, and using diminished chords that were not built in one form," said guitarist Johnny Shines, who occasionally played with Johnson. "He'd do rundowns, turnarounds, arounds, going down to the sixth and seventh. None of this was being done."

Johnson could hear a song once on a juke box and then pick up his guitar and play it note for note. He could make his guitar sound as if it were talking, or produce the big, full sound of an entire band. His girlfriends would wake up in the middle of the night to see him sitting by the window, quietly picking his guitar in the moonlight.

"One time in St. Louis we were playing "Come On In My Kitchen," said Shines. "He was playing very slow and passionately, and when he quit, I noticed no one was saying anything. Then I realized they were crying …"

Rumors immediately circulated that Johnson made a deal with the Devil in return for his stunning new ability. (In reality he moved to his hometown of Hazlehurst, Mississippi, married an older woman who supported him, and practiced every moment he could). In an area steeped in voodoo and superstition, this was not a surprising assumption. Besides, other musicians had claimed similar deals—including Tommy Johnson, a contemporary of Robert's who lived near Hazlehurst and drank a can of Sterno a day.

"Take your guitar and go to where a crossroads is," Tommy's brother LeDell told a later researcher. "Get there just a little before twelve that night. Play a piece there by yourself .… A big black man will walk up there and take your guitar, and he'll tune it. And then he'll play a piece and hand it back to you." Tommy told LeDell: "That's how I learned to play anything I want."

Whatever the methods, Johnson was quick to enjoy the rewards. He became chronically footloose, roaming as far away as the East Coast to play the bars and even the sidewalks. He had an endless succession of girlfriends ("Women, for Robert, were like motel rooms," wrote Johnny Shines). And he had more money in his pocket than any common fieldhand would ever have.

Johnson, in other words, lived a life—albeit a brief one, perhaps part of the deal—of freedom, fame, and relative wealth that musicians have been living and dying for ever since. One of the songs he recorded above the Buick showroom in San Antonio was called "The Last Fair Deal Gone Down." For the son of a poor black field hand from Mississippi, that may well have been true.

In the small town of Friar's Point, a pickup truck pulls up in front of Hersberg's Drugstore and three dusty black men get out, waving their weekly paychecks. They stomp into an adjacent shanty (it turns out to be a liquor store; there's no sign) and soon emerge with bottles of Thunderbird and Old Grand-Dad. The Thunderbird and Old Grand-Dad are the beginning of an evening that will end some twelve hours later, possibly at daybreak, in the Black Cat Lounge or the White Castle or any of the nameless joints on nearby Sheriffs Ridge Rd. It's a Friday evening that can't be much different from countless ones Johnson witnessed during his musical career; Johnson, in fact, performed in front of the very Hersberg's Drugstore that is still there today.

Friar's Point is so small you can see the cotton fields through the houses a quarter mile away. There is a modern brick post office and the tiny North Delta Museum, which has a tank, an old red tractor, and an anti-aircraft gun on its front lawn. Across from the museum is Hersberg's, a place that sells everything from BB guns to fountain drinks. Johnson was paid to play on the sidewalk there and collect a crowd, which he probably managed to do. Around the corner from Hersberg's is the Black Cat Lounge where, as advertised by a handwritten cardboard sign in a store window ("Come jam with us," it says), a large, rough musician named Smokey Joe does essentially the same thing Johnson used to do fifty-odd years ago.

"Smokey Joe's a dangerous man," one of the black kids on the street corner advises me, using a word Muddy Waters once used to describe Johnson. "He's big and you can't stay in there too long. Women just pile themselves on him when he plays."

We are standing on the corner in front of the Black Cat and everyone seems a little uneasy.

"Hey, do you want to buy some crack?" someone finally asks.

Through the houses I can look out into the cotton fields. The question seems grotesquely out of place.

I shake my head.

"Just as well," the seller says. "But remember, you gotta die of something."

Crack in the Delta—and there's a lot of it, don't be fooled by the country air—is, depending on who you talk to, either the Scourge of the Century or the Last Fair Deal Gone Down. The rewards are the same ones that Johnson bargained for in the '30's: money, girlfriends, local notoriety. The result is a powderflash of fast life that is almost sure to end badly ("What's he going to do with all the money?" I asked the girlfriend of a New Orleans drug dealer who had $50, 000 in the bank. "Pay bail," she said. "Or start a real business if he gets out of this in time.") The economic situation in the Delta, particularly for blacks, makes crack a tempting business. And the white establishment sees both drugs and blues with the same kind—though very different degrees—of mistrust. ("Well don't get carried away," said the matronly, white-haired owner of The Den, a Clarksdale restaurant, when I told her I was in town to hear some music.)

Crack is a new twist on an old theme. Traditionally crime, music and sports have been the three avenues of success that don't depend on privilege; and, traditionally, the price has been steep. Muhammad Ali has a hard time speaking coherently. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Elvis Presley—the list is long—made early death practically de rigueur for young stars. And crack dealers, convicted under recent legislation, can face life imprisonment with no hope of parole for certain offenses.

The economics of the area are easy to blame for the "crack epidemic," though the problem runs much deeper. There are jobs to be had in the Delta, but they exist in a context of such hopelessness that young black men need a nearly blind optimism to take advantage of them. Conventional routes to success simply don't exist. In the absence of such things as adequate education, the racism inherent in the welfare state becomes a racism not of laws, as during Jim Crow, but of opportunities. What inducement can there be to work for $3. 35 an hour? What hope can there be of a $3. 35-an-hour job turning into something better?

"Racism is a very expensive state of mind," says commu nity organizer Malcolm Walls. (Expensive not just in terms of tax dollars, which it is—keeping a population economically dysfunctional can't be cheap—but in terms of lives wasted, of futures denied). "You can go into the drug business with a welfare check and suddenly be making 1, 000 dollars a week. People here are going to have to die and die and die before the racism is gone."

Walls has pointed out that one of the flaws of the welfare system is that it's based on power, not money. Flimsy housing projects are built when the same money could be used to guarantee loans for individual families to buy their own houses—which, finally, would put people in control of their lives. Control is the key. A proposed bill in the Louisiana state legislature required welfare recipients to undergo regular drug tests to receive their checks (on the elegant equation that the poor receive welfare, the poor take drugs, so the poor spend their welfare money on drugs. Actually, it's grandmothers and unwed mothers—hardly the big crack users—who receive most of the welfare.) The law, of course, would not prevent anyone from investing in drugs, which is more of a problem; all it would do is demonstrate to the poor how those in power can turn the money off and on.

Malcolm Walls is the director of the Mississippi Action for Community Education in Greenville; he is also, no less importantly, the organizer of the Delta Blues Festival, which takes place in a field outside of town every fall. Although the Festival brings in some of the biggest blues musicians in the country, it also draws on a rich pool of local talent. ("I want this to stay a picnic," says Walls; "when it becomes a concert they can kiss my ass goodbye.") One of the best-known locals is Roosevelt "Booba" Barnes, a guitarist, singer and harmonica player who weekly rocks a little cement-floored juke joint on Nelson Street in the best Delta fashion.

Greenville's Nelson Street is, for most whites in town and probably for a lot of blacks, a frankly scary stretch of asphalt where young drug dealers chase cars on foot down the street, hoping to make a sale ("Whadda you need? Whadda you need?" they yell). It's also, perhaps not coincidentally, the home of some of the best blues in the area. The street has its respectable parts but the "bad stretch"—literally on the other side of the railroad tracks—is a row of ramshackle juke joints with hand-painted signs orno signs at all: The Scorpio Club, The New Club Sade, LakeSlaughter's Club, Eugene's Basement. Crowds shuffle endlessly from place to place on Saturday nights, ducking into doorways that give no clue of the bar within: a glimpse of dancing, the clack of a pool ball, and then the door swings shut.

Barnes' Playboy Club is a stone's throw from the tracks at the edge of the bad stretch. It's a low, crumbling building with industrial fans the size of DC-3 propellers bricked into the walls and a patchwork of plywood boards facing the street. In the back of the room are ladders, car tires, and a jumble of old sound equipment. There is a juke box with titles from former Delta sing ers—Bobby "Blue" Bland, B. B. King, Little Milton—and a precarious-looking bar where Barnes sells, mostly, quart-bottles of Miller and 25-cent setups for those who bring their own booze.

The Playboy Club has the only regular live music on the street. Every weekend Barnes and his band play a driving, hoarse-voiced blues that may be the closest thing to Howlin' Wolf, now dead, the world is ever going to hear. The atmosphere in the bar ranges from well-lit and calm, early-on, to a dark crush of bodies by the end of the night. People stand shakily on chairs yelling, "Sing the blues, Booba! Sing the blues!" Old ladies dance out in front of him and lift their skirts, swivel their hips. A man who has been unconscious on the pool table for two hours suddenly finds new strength in the music and bounds to the dance floor in a frenzy. People literally climb the walls, or anything they can grab onto. One night the lights went out while Barnes was singing "my baby bought a ticket, long as my right arm …" The band kept playing, the people kept dancing, and all that could be seen was the red cigarette tips that swirled like fire-flies in the dark.

One hot, windy Friday afternoon I had a chance to talk to Barnes about the music he plays and the tradition he preserves. He is, he says, one of the last musicians to play "out in the country" (at a place called The Tin House on Sunday nights). It was in a country juke joint at age seventeen that he got his start, playing for the workers on the Leroy Grace plantation outside Greenville.

"We'd start up late and catch the people leaving town at two o'clock when the bars closed. We'd play till five or six in the morning."

Barnes was born in 1936 in Longwood, Mississippi. He's not an imposing man, physically, but his self-assurance and the rough edges of his voice command respect from the most unruly drunk. Born two years before Robert Johnson died, Barnes knew personally Sonny Boy Williamson and other early blues singers. He has a family and does not touch alcohol; he is a man, one feels, who has made no deals at all. When he was young he played in bars that allowed no blacks except the members of the band. "I was there to play my music—I just held my head up and kept going," he says ofthat experience. The blues he has played since age seven may be on the wane, he admits, but will never vanish completely.

"The juke joints are dying out, and I know the young kids are into other stuff. But they'll always sit and listen to the blues. And, you know, you never hear about no disco festival anywhere."

Barnes can't talk long because he's got to fill the ice bin and pick up his bartender at her house. He leaves me to finish my beer in the welcome blast of one of the industrial fans. I finally get up and go outside, squinting in the sunlight. Whirlwinds of dust hurry down the street. On the sidewalk, clusters of young men wait and watch, pass a bottle or count their change.

Many of them are drug dealers (you can tell by the way they try to catch your eye) and, if asked, many of them would express envy at Barnes's success. The broke dealer I toured Greenville with seemed to think Barnes simply had a God-given talent that he trotted out on stage from time to time. He didn't realize Barnes plays three, sometimes four nights a week, every week of die year, and that his ability on guitar is the result of nearly forty years of practice. ("It's been nice workin' for you all," an elderly blues singer once said to a white, college-educated audience in Boston, and Barnes is similarly humble: "Let's have a hand for the people because without them there wouldn't be no stars," he says on stage). The debt of the musician to his fans, and the labor, even drudgery involved in a rise to the top is something that the fans generally don't want to know about. It ruins, perhaps, the idea of easy success, and die hope that the same success could visit them.

Robert Johnson got a lot of mileage out of the misconception that there are shortcuts available to musicians. The truth of the matter is he spent a year supported by an older woman so that he could, in all likelihood, work his long fingers to the bone to learn guitar. He traded the hours of his day for status and money as any good office professional would do today.

Then, after his apprenticeship, came a life of wandering that obviously caused Johnson pain and regret. Underneath the bravado of his lyrics is a despair that turns the blood cold: "Standin' at the crossroads, I tried to flag a ride / Didn't nobody seem to know me, everybody passed me by.& I'v e got to keep movin', blues fallin' down like hail / And the days keep worryin' me, there's a Hellhound on my trail."

The fact that his life precluded what the poorest field-hand had—a home, a family—may ultimately be the Deal Johnson so often referred to. The hellhound that pursued him would be the anguish of watching a conventional domestic life slip further and further from his grasp. And in his loneliness he would hit the road again, guitar in hand, to play the music that was supposed to have made it all worthwhile.

The Yoruba of Africa believed in a trickster God, Legba, who was associated with crossroads and who provided a conduit for supernatural powers. Suicides in England were traditionally buried at crossroads because that was a suitably lonely resting place for those who had severed their ties with God and community. It is interesting, given Robert Johnson's life, that the names of his two possible grave-sites reek of similar banishment: Three Fork Cemetery and Four Corners Cemetery. It is also interesting—given these two grave-sites—how Johnson ended "Me And The Devil Blues," one of his most damning songs: "You can bury my body down by the highway side / So my old evil spirit can catch a Greyhound bus and ride."

It's as if he had an inkling of what sort of death his life would produce. It's as if he knew the outcome of saying, too loudly or bitterly, "I grew up working in cotton fields. Don't tell me about no damn job."