The Fife

They marched through the SAND along the Yazoo, their sounds of fife and DRUM wafting through the swamp, waking alligators. Dancing people shouted, "Goat!"

One hundred fifty years before, slaves found broken drums abandoned in battlefields. They patched them with pine tar. Their fifes they made from reeds. The music created wasn't marshal. They had never heard it. Instead the fifes made the sound of souls keening, detached from the drumbeat. When the white planters heard the music spiriting down bayous, they barred their doors saying, "The devil's on the loose."

Oleander, the fife player at the head of the line, was 100. This was his fiftieth year to host the feast for his neighbors. Used to be old tennant farmers, but now it was more and more white people he didn't know, coming from places like Chicago and St. Louis because they'd seen him at a folk or blues festival and thought visiting the Delta would give them soul. When Oleander reached the goat pits he lowered his fife.

"Everybody shout goat!" he yelled.

The people shouted "Goat!" Oleander saw the young black men at the edge of the river, singing rap, not interested in his music. Who will continue?.

The cooks heaved the first goat from the pit and brought out the KNIFE. Oleander didn't feel hungry, found himself a lawn swing and sat, resting his fife. He thought about the man who taught him to play, an emancipated slave. I'm so old, Oleander thought, that I knew former slaves. Who will carry this on?

A little girl came up to the swing.

"I don't much like goat," she said, reaching her dimpled fingers to the fife.

"Would you like to learn to play?" Oleander said. "I can make you one."

"I'd like that a lot."