Half of Paradise Read Free Page B

back-of-town Memphis, and he had black marcelled hair, sideburns, a high oil-slick forehead, and gold plating around the edges of his teeth. His lean jaws worked slowly as he chewed a piece of gum. The man with him was named Seth. He was tall and he had coarse brown hair like straw, and his face was scarred from smallpox. The skin was deeply pockmarked and reddened, and there was a scent of whiskey on his breath.
    “I got something for you to sign,” Hunnicut said. “This is just a talent show and you don’t get paid. If you win you appear on the Louisiana Jubilee, and then we’ll talk about a salary. Seth and Troy will be on the show tonight, but they’re not in the contest.”
    He gave J.P. a release to sign. J.P. put his signature at the bottom in pencil in large awkward letters.
    “What’s your full name?” Hunnicut said.
    “That’s it.”
    “Your initials stand for something, don’t they?”
    “J.P. is my name, mister. I ain’t got no other.”
    “Where are you from?” Troy, the man with the black marcelled hair, said.
    “Up north of here by the Arkansas line.”
    “All right, boy. You’re all set to go. We’ll see you this evening,” Hunnicut said.
    J.P. picked up his guitar case and left the audition room.
    “You figure he come to town on a mule?” Troy said.
    “He’s going to do all right,” Hunnicut said.
    “You ain’t going to let him win?”
    “He’s the man.”
    “He’s a hillbilly.”
    “You want to know something? I’ll tell you why you’ll never be anything but a dime and nickel picker in somebody’s troupe. Because you got no idea of what it takes to get on top of the pile. You either got to know how to act like a hick and make the real hicks think you’re as stupid as they are, or if you’re a real hick you got to have somebody with brains enough behind you to make the other hicks think like you want them to. The way to make money from hicks is to sell them a hick. And that boy is just what they want.”
    “He’s still got fertilizer on his shoes,” Troy said.
    J.P. crossed the street and walked towards the hotel. He had rented a room without a bath in the older part of the business district. The hotel was an ugly three-story building with rusted fire escapes and one wall had been blackened by a fire. He took his key from the desk clerk and went upstairs.
    The room had a musty odor to it. He turned on the ceiling fan and opened the window. He leaned on the sill and looked down into the street. He saw the cotton exchange and the sample bales wrapped in brown paper and partially torn open and stacked by the side entrance; there were drygoods stores, a Negro peddler selling fruit from a wagon, groups of men in overalls and seersucker suits who talked and chewed tobacco and spit over the curbing, women in cotton-print dresses looking through the store windows at the cheap machine-made merchandise, and the late afternoon sun beat down on the asphalt and filled the air with a hot, humid odor. A man who had his legs amputated at the knees sat propped against one of the buildings with a hat in his hand. There were several pencils in the hat. People passed him by without notice, some looked at him in curiosity, one woman dropped a coin into his hat. He sat on a board platform with small metal wheels underneath. He rolled himself along the sidewalk by pushing with his hands against the pavement. J.P. watched him disappear around the corner. He turned away from the window and lay down on the bed.
    He took out his guitar and drew his thumb slowly across the strings. Sometimes he used a beer cap for a pick as the cotton field workers did who used to play guitar in the juke joints on the edge of town. He had first liked music as a small boy when he used to sit on the levee in the late evening down by the nigger graveyard and listen to the funeral marches and see the sweating faces in the glow of pine fagots and hear the music that seemed to tell the sorrow of an entire race.
    He