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He reminds us of a ghost story.
Of wooden sheds in an old Mississippi forest, lit by porch lamps and visited by spirits.
"Do you have the nerve to drive them from your door?" he asks.
His voice cracks, whimpering and beaten back but then
surging forward again like a weak man being brave.
His ten fingers dance with twelve strings, and an old microphone.
The Blind Man tells his story.
Or rather, sings his song.
It is clever how he plays while next to a dresser with a large mirror.
Because, like the Blind Man, a dresser mirror cannot see. It projects.
It reflects back at the world, not exactly as was received,
but still more true than any eyeball's sight.
Like his singing, the mirror holds the little room in itself, and releases back out.
He sings to no answer, to the hypnotized ceiling, conjures his hoodoo to an empty window
with flowing white, veil-like curtains.
Into the walls, into cheap bedsheets and into the halls.
(Out there it's faint). But this room is his whole world right now.
This blind man doesn't blink.
He'll leave this room, for another one.
He'll lurch through Atlanta, and hop trains (with help from a seeing-eye hobo) heading to Texas.
But for now, he's alone in a room, with his twelve strings and a microphone.
His mouth is barely open, and not opened evenly.
The side of his mouth is all that he allows, and his song squeezes out.
It emerges scraped, and raw.
His knuckles begin to hurt but he keeps playing.
When he stops he'll be just a blind black man in Hattiesburg, Mississippi,
guitar in a case so it doesn't get broken and a cane in his hand so neither will he.
But right now he's the storyteller, the songsinger,
and he doesn't want to break any spells just yet.
His ghosts will catch up to him in Georgia.
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