Bluebird, Bluebird (Highway 59, #1)

by Attica Locke

he also felt a hot rage at the students and professors around him, most of them white northerners, clucking their tongues and whispering Texas in a way that suggested both pity and disdain for a land that Darren loved, a state that had made him a gentleman and a fighter in equal measure. It was hard to put any of it into words. So he didn’t try. He simply walked out.

He left Mississippi with two of his brothers in the late fifties, settling first in Gary, Indiana, then later in Chicago, the mecca for Delta blues, homeboys from the Deep South bringing their music up north. Joe soon fell in with Muddy Waters and a young Buddy Guy, played in a band with Little Walter, and had a regular gig doing session work for the Chess brothers. He toured some, joining Bobby “Blue” Bland’s group, but never broke out on his own. He stopped touring and recording in the late sixties, and he was killed in a robbery in Lark, Texas, in 2010, at the age of seventy-one.

If meth had laid those lines on her face, there was no way to tell; the drug ran on its own time.