In the Court of the Yellow King Read Online Free PDF Page B

tourists weren’t around, this Ska stuff that a half-Chinese bandleader named Byron Lee was trying to figure out a way to bring to the mainland. There was so much I didn’t get to do. Is. So much.
    So much. I’m transfixed with rage and despair, seeing a man’s life and every hope and ambition prostrate, bleeding and infuriated. The thing which is to come has escaped His primary vessel, or will, and already seized throne and empire. Woe to any who try to countenance the King when He opens his tattered mantle!
    The first time we met, it was at his old home place. I was supposed to write it down, or keep notes. The memories are a vast black gully-buster stormfront rolling yonder, a mighty river of clouds that, when beheld in approach are actually a lake. A hole in the sky.
    The lake of Halì, which hi des the city of Carc osa. Far out in the l ake, distant thunder rumbles like the bel ly of the Beast that cometh down between worlds, down in the Big Blow, the big Del ta Hurricane of 1936, to a shotgun shack with a leaky tin roof and no crib for a bed, s louching toward Carc osa to be bound, wher e hens don’t lay nor roosters crow, where owls hoot at noon a nd children write HE LP backwards in the frost on windows no one ever sees. Listen to the beating of y our blood. Daub it ov er your own transom. Listen to the rain o f maggots. Frogs. The King walks upon Nash ville and New York....
    Came I then to Tupelo, and the kaleidoscope sun. And the heat. And the chiggers beneath the skin. The hot rocks of the road barefoot coals. Came I then to Tupelo to eat with a fiend, and watch the Book of Revelation born in a borrowed bed.
    Came I then to Tupelo. I had a whole new cross to bear later, but I had to visit the birthplace first. No more than an hour’s drive from Memphis, that two-room shack where his twin was born dead, where his Mama brought him that hardware-store guitar. I had to look. I had to see.
    I got good and loaded on the way there, at some juke-joint in their little strip of a downtown where a spade cat poured me “good whiskey” when I asked for it by name and tip, and two other spade cats (one with a hollow-body guitar, and one walking an upright bass) were there on the little stage playing dirty blues and owning the whole block with lost chords, with howls and moans and waking sagas. Singing for their supper.
    I left the rental car downtown. I knew better. And no glen-plaid Brooks Brothers suit for the Moondog, either. The clothes I wore that day came from L.L. Bean, and the sneakers P.F. Flyers that looked so age-inappropriate on me when I got them on that I made a note to go pick up four more pairs when I got back to the Big Apple.
    I got down and walked as far as I could. After a while, I stripped to an undershirt and only smoked where there was shade. After a while, I realized there were no more cotton plants in the fields around, nor sorghum nor anything but rocks, rocks, rocks and bones for a half a mile. The dirt was powdery gray, and not a flower or blade of grass to the sky.
    I had to see the shack, and couldn’t have held back if my own life had been the prize. The little flat-roofed white crackerbox. The sharecropper’s shed, only Vernon didn’t even have his shit together enough to sharecrop.
    Even from the sandhill two miles out, I could feel someone watching me from the yard like they knew who I was, what I brought, the other thing I’d come to see. Someone who maybe didn’t want to be rude to Yet Another Feller From The City.
    She was barefoot. Her feet were caked with gray mud and red clay, but even that was fetching, where the pale shell-pink creatures (callused into hooves by going barefoot half the year) swung from way up the trunk of the big mimosa tree in the front yard and out onto the thickest branch, looking off into the distance. At me. Or so it seemed.
    Her lovely head of black, wavy hair was crowned with a headdress that looked like it came from some fabulous other race out of