At the Base of the Blues Tree: Una Ofrenda for Jimmy Davis, Chicago Blues Man

(after the painting Á rbol de Blues by Roberto Valadez) The hands of this telling tree pull him from the cobalt bowl sky, bring Jimmy back to the ruins of Maxwell Street hunched in dusk. He stood where strings intersected frets like tracks meeting ties on the Illinois Central’s passage from the Mississippi Delta, then followed the bread crumbs of troubadours to this steel city. Twelve-hour shifts beckoned mexicanos north on the Union Pacific from Piedras Negras to Pilsen, Back of the Yards. How many grandparents, mothers and fathers, pounded stake into soil, snuck or were shoved into boxcars, leapt onto the train’s iron rungs as it shuddered along the rails to foundries where they poured molten metal, faced hot licks of the blast furnace’s growl and hiss? How many lugged themselves north to slaughterhouses that drooled rank puddles at their feet? This, so sons and daughters might step off into another era, choose instruments of wood and metal, axes of their own timbre. This so Jimmy might mix his own palette— tune each turquoise pitch and purple tone into an electric blues old as corridos, but new to the mexicanos who came each Sunday to the market at Maxwell. New to the ears of Roberto, a boy, who would keep his ranchera rhythms close as a pair of old jeans but grow into the blues as he listened to the heirs of Papa Jackson— Johnny Young, Howlin’ Wolf, Nighthawk and Maxwell Jimmy. Now Roberto sits in overalls at an easel, splits the hairs of his brush over how to compose this ofrenda, this homage. How to take Jimmy back in time to the market whose merchants once hustled with tricks for trade ancient as Africa, as Toltec Mexico, Maxwell, whose live blues bands and car radios belting norteño mixes made every Sunday a session. How to take Jimmy back to Maxwell’s gathering spot where he guzzles from an aluminum garden blooming atop his amp, swings his ax— fingers climbing its trunk, plucking twigs— while our feet tap the roots of this wailing tree. Notes skip through alleys of his voice like gravel pinging off windshields, lift a pitch high enough to singe the autumn sky— cousin to the red and green gritos of the barrio only blocks away. Twelve bars spin like metal rims, stack like hubcaps, chords crackling in the tin barrels of his laughter. When the people gather, he sputters, What did the one-eyed woman say? and waits for them to peer into the devil’s draw of his eyes before he roars, Where is my one-eyed man? But we barely get to the punch line, to the end of a set, before the mayor swings his ax, a claw that rips this árbol de blues up by its roots; before Chicago swings its wrecking ball to level homes, stores, restaurants, bars; before troops graffiti-blast, scrub and cinch-sack it all, but one empty wall where someone has scrawled Jimmy’s name among the others in this hall of fame: Willie, Hound Dog, Honey Boy, Sal, the many legends who’ve shared the marrow of their music, of Santana’s hearty soup with the bones still in it steaming with sabor and sometimes weeping.