Harvard Law & Merigold, MS

“Jook” is a word for “Negro pleasure house”, often a “bawdy house” where black workers “dance, drink and gamble”.

                                                            -Zora Neale Hurston

“Juke” - Gullah, meaning “disorderly” or “wicked”

Ely was sitting on his couch at the Cuckoo’s Nest, playing Call of Duty, and had just put a new log in the wood burning stove when Roach walked in with a tallboy.

“What’s up man, what you doin’?”

“Nothing.”

 “Let’s go over to Crawdads and see if they got some girls.”

Ely was pissed anyway because some ten year old kid from Rhode Island had been whipping his ass for the past hour, so he threw his headset on the coffee table, picked up his .45 laying right next to it (“cause they don’t make a .46”) and shoved it down the front of his Levis.  Grabbed a new pack of cigarettes and downed the last of his beer.

Followed Roach out of the heavy warehouse door that served as the entrance to the Nest, and as they passed Ely’s 2500 Super Duty, he reached in, laid the gun on the console, and rummaged around the empty boxes of Marlboro 72s, dried up pouched of Levi Garrett, and empty Nabs packs until he found his Zippo.

Crawdads was across the street.  Gravel parking lot with dirty brand new pick up trucks.  Only Fords and Chevys.  Farmers.  SUVs for the females with stickers of the private academies their kids attended on the backs, vanity plates on the fronts supporting the crop their husbands or their daddys grew.

A lawn sprinkler sat on top of the building, run during the summer, fanning right to left, keeping the tin roof cool.  But no need now in the middle of deer season.  The smell of grilled red meat filled the air, and slapped them in the face when they walked inside.  Manager politely saying hello, though he had asked Ely before not to come back.  Fuck him. 

Walk down a couple of narrow halls, and then the room opened up to the bar and dance floor.  Neon signs for Miller and Bud.  Skinny white boys in Columbia shirts and Polo hats with the wrap-around hair bartending just because they were Pikes and making mixed drinks to their best guess.  Calling the drinks stupid names like “Delta Martini” and “Merigold Mint Julep” and “Mississippi Mud Slide”.  Women in their mid 30’s and early 40’s, tight jeans and tops made to hide their bellies but enhance their boobs, mad cause their husbands are at hunting camp and won’t have sex with them anymore and looking for greener grass that would be nice to their kids.  Men in Mossy Oak hats and four-day growth and muddy boots hunting for a version of what their wife used to look like so they could take her back to hunting camp and justify why he wasn’t ever killing anything.

Back 40 was the band.  Coupled with the occasional yell and drunken request for “Free Bird”, it was a typical Thursday night.

There were three girls sitting off at a table to the right by a stuffed loggerhead turtle.  One black, one white, and one half black with a little Jap off in her or something.  Ely wasn’t real sure, even the next day.  But she was the hottest one out of all of them, which pissed the mid-30s & 40s former beauty queens.  Coupled with their short hair, lack of makeup, and the fact that no men were talking to them despite their relative attractiveness, one could tell these three weren’t southern women.

Southern women carry themselves a certain way.  They do not chase men.  They are taught that by their mothers and grandmothers.  Instead, they attract men.  A proper southern woman, if she just looks at him right, can pull a man from a group of friends, through clouds of blue smoke, over two tables and maybe even cause him to spill his beer.  This has happened more times than I care to acknowledge.

They are queens of flattery, both to men and to each other.  They can say things that sometimes take you two or three minutes (or up until the next day) to figure out the meaning of.  At that point you decide whether it was genuine or doublespeak.  Flattery is a sacredly held art form, developed in a southern woman’s early years at debutante balls and cotillions and pilgrimages and given its final touches during the four (or five) years of sorority life. 

Southern women flirt, and do it quietly and well.  They touch you lightly on your shoulder, laugh at your jokes while locking eyes just for a moment then look away and intentionally give you the impression that you are the most interesting man in the world.  And you walk away feeling that you are.

Southern women sit whenever they can.  They do not stand up to talk to you.  When they must walk, they walk with their shoulders back and their chin up, exposing their throat, eyes just a little above the horizon.  They do this not just to establish dominance among other men and women but also often to prominently display whatever shiny thing they likely have around their neck which keeps us lesser creatures in check, and slightly envious.  

They wrap a napkin around the label of their bottled light beer, if that’s what they choose to drink. They don’t stand when they smoke, and they can make a cigarette look delicious, even though it is not.   

They don’t discuss politics or religion, but not because they can’t.  And when you talk about the War, they get quiet. 

Though a lot of attributes of southern women have been lost through the generations, such as cooking or sewing or other assorted antiquated attributes…propriety in public is not one of them.

And when a southern woman turns the lights off, so is her propriety. 

But it is proper not to discuss it. 

Ely played it cool as he always did.  Walked to the bar, took his cigarettes out of his front pocket, lit one and ordered a Bud Light.  Nodded to the bartender in a plume of blue smoke, knowing that he used to beat his ass and chase him through the mud with his own truck back during hell week when he was a Pike.  Nothing needed to be said.  The fraternal feeling was already there.  Ely got his beer for free.  Roach, however, being from New York and therefore not as coached in the cat and mouse game of meeting women, couldn’t help himself and immediately tromped his way over to the three foreigners.  After about ten minutes, and ordering them shots he couldn’t afford, he motioned for Ely to come join them.

They girls were from Harvard Law.  Brittney (black), Aeriel (white) and Natasha (the one that was half black half something).  The girls were working in Clarksdale, as part of the Innocence Project.  Proud of it too, as if all we did around here was throw them in jail for being B.I.P.  Or as if the prosecutors had some racist agenda or were trying to get their numbers up.  Hell, they couldn’t understand that we were lucky to even get a conviction here in the Delta with some of our jury pools and outstanding police work.  But as the night wore on, and the cheap beer and shots flowed, the topics of conversation went from serious to sundry things, and finally the girls let on that they wanted to go to Monkey’s.

Every tourist wants to go to Monkey’s. Every one.  Ever since it appeared in the March 2, 2007 edition of the New York Times, we’ve had all kinds down here.  One night, I was sitting in there a few summers ago…hot…steamy…a blues band rocking at full blast, the place kept flipping the circuit breaker due to the window units running at big snowflake.  Finally, Mr. Monkey announced in the pitch black we could either have air or turn the band down, and the whole place yelled fuck that and we sweated on.  That’s the kind of place it was.

The same night, a charter bus pulled up from North Carolina containing giggling little white girls and half the Wake Forest basketball team.  They were doing a two week tour on poverty in the south for some class that was supposed to make a difference, and they were driving from New Orleans to Chicago, basically stopping along the way just to look at poor people.  So they stopped in to take a look at us.  I stayed in the corner and sipped my beer, and they didn’t speak to me, as if I was some white oppressor monitoring my flock.  The basketball guys just shot pool, thanking god they didn’t grow up around here.  And after about an hour of the white girls taking party pics with random old black and broken field hands, clutching their just purchased 32 oz beers, I, while slightly blinded by the flashes, realized why orangutans throw their own shit back at you when you are at the zoo.

But now it was Thursday night, and therefore Family Night, so it was a good time to head out there.  Ely, Roach, and Harvard Law loaded up in Ely’s truck, parked back in front of the Nest, and they swung by One Stop to get a twelve pack. 

HotRod was standing out front by the “No Loitering” sign, with his M&M’s jacket on and skull cap, smoking a Newport and  being everybody’s “partna” just trying to “hold a dolla” when he recognized Ely walking in and asked him what’s going on.

“Whattup Sly?”

“Shit, nothing to it.  Got some girls in the truck.  We about to go to Monkey’s.  They wanna get naked.”

“Fo real?”

“Yeah, fo real.  You ought to slide past there.  Maybe get you a little something something.”

“They down to give it up?”

“Yeah, they with me, ain’t they?”

“Aight then.  Cool cool.  I’ll be out that way.”

The girls had stayed in the truck. Who was that? Aw just a guy who used to work on my daddy’s farm, and we used to pay his wages in cornmeal.  They got wide eyed and quiet.  Ely’s daddy built custom cabinets.  Ely worked with him too.  Always had.  They never had no farm.  And his daddy never spent any money.  Hence the “My Boss is a Jewish Carpenter” sticker on the back window of the 2500.  The girls had thought he was Church of Christ or something.

The glass packs roared south down Hwy 61 and turned right by the Pemble Farms sign.  Then they cut left and hit gravel, spinnin and spraying and winding down next to the bayou where the cypress knees stuck out of the icy water.  Monkey’s was right there on the left, under the orange sodium light.  It was cold, and no one was outside, despite the hoopties and occasional Cadillac clogging up the limited parking.  The music was spilling out of the cracks and patches of the clapboard building.  Ely pulled up in the field next to it, and went ahead and put the truck in 4H so they could get out when it was time to go.

They walked up to the front, girls wide-eyed.  Ely held the door open for them, his lone stretch on being a southern gentleman, but Harvard Law collectively motioned for him to go in first.  They could hold the door themselves.  It slapped behind them.

Monkeys was dark and the ceiling low, toy monkeys hanging everywhere.  Posters for beer commercials, old blues concerts, and Elvis.  The DJ was spinning Bobby Bland, there wasn’t a live band tonight.  But the girls were into it anyway.  Everyone went up to the counter which separates the juke joint from his bedroom, and Mr. Monkey was leaned over the front of the bar in his red and white suit with matching hat, whiskey glass by his hand and cheroot  pinched in the side of his mouth.  He smiled, recognizing Ely as “good people”, asked them what they wanted.  Couple of 32oz Bud Lights. 

They sat in an old airplane seat off to the side, and just watched.  Skinny old black men in caps and hats with feathers out the top and collars that were in style thirty years ago.  Large black women who knew they looked good, gyrating and grinding both on the dance floor and at the tables.  It didn’t matter. 

Music pumping, vibrating, mouths moving but hearing no speech, smiles, gold and silver flashing, grease running down cheeks and across foreheads, sweat, bodies, stink.  One got down on all fours on the dance floor, drawing attention from Harvard Law, while two men took turns sliding their bodies back and forth behind her.  Black fat looking better than white fat.  Cold on the outside, hot on the inside, steam rising from the roof into the orange night light.  Ely smoked in the dark, the ember periodically showing a flash of his face.  Grinning.

HotRod slid in the side door to avoid the five dollar cover, brushed his waves forward one last time, winked at the airplane seat, and strutted onto the dance floor to take his turn.