Natalie Elliott 

The juke joint is, above all things, a functional establishment—you have no idea how necessary it is until you visit one. The thought of hammering out particle board floors with your work-swollen feet loses all meaning as seen from the perspective of a tourist. Experience is necessary. Partake; sweat it all out.

We pile into a car dressed in our Sunday best—as I was told, first time guests like myself need to make a good impression, so my outfit needed to be pre-approved by my seasoned companions. And Bettie’s Place is indeed a Sunday affair. Willie King’s band goes onstage between the seven and eight o’clock hour and no later, for everybody in attendance has got somewhere to be on the following Monday morning. As well, the dancing does have to stop, at eleven PM sharp, regardless of how badly you think you need to go on.

In the unnamed land between Aliceville and Prairie Point, Mississippi the streets are darker. There are no street lamps and the only light comes from one gas station that looks perpetually closed. You’ll likely miss your turn once or twice as Sandyland Road, on which Bettie’s sits, is no fanfare in the slightest. Bettie’s itself is a wood-shingled double-wide trailer, slouching on a gravel parking lot. On this occasion a single truck parked in front of the building, owned by Willie or some relation of his is the only sign of patronage. We walk up and greet Willie (pictured at right) who, leaning up against the truck bed, wears a white T-shirt with a picture of himself printed on it, and a red trucker’s cap. Only one in our group is able to partially decipher exactly what Mr. King says, but we nod in a polite genuflecting manner. We make our way to the door where the bouncer, a man who must be a thousand years old, is grinning above the lapels of his blue suit. It is, in fact, July, and this man is wearing a full suit complete with wing-tip shoes sitting outside policing the five-dollar obligatory donation.

The lack of decoration at Bettie’s is notable. The walls, ceilings, floors, tables, corners, are all windowless particle board. At first flinch you might want to say, “lack of atmosphere,” but the fact is; well, this is the atmosphere. Stripped down and sultry; folks lining the walls wearing the same garb they wore to church that morning; women fanning themselves apathetically; only a few glances flirt with the sight of us. The bartender is also the owner of the place, a man of menacing stature but a kind disposition. We order whiskeys and beer; shoot one and sip the other.

The band starts up. Willie King sits in front with a stubbed-out cigarette stuck in the strings of his guitar near the tuning keys. The organist, a transplanted British fellow, launches into a noticeable Ray Charles cover. At this point I am feeling it; the whiskey or the what-have-you, but I get the notion I would like to dance. No one in my group, however, volunteers. As if he materialized in the corner of the room, a gentleman in his mid-sixties shuffles out onto the floor, still wearing his work shirt. I am nudged to go join him. The man wanders around the room, approaching ladies, getting rejected each time. I chalk it up to my feverish desire to dance, but I offer my hand kindly to the gentleman. He loves it. We dance through what little remains of the song and my wits return to me.

You can blame it on drunkenness, or just a body's nerves letting themselves unwind. After a while even the most reluctant proper wallflowers are out on the floor, including a man completely dependent on his cane. I dance with him myself; he hands his cane forcibly off to a friend, and with his hand on my hip, I seamlessly replace the cane and we, well, juke. The same gentleman later made a mystifying spectacle at least twice, hobbling out into the center of the dance floor letting both hat and cane fly while dancing. It was as if Jesus Christ had made a miraculous appearance at a Southern revival, healing all in his path. The man came in a cripple and went away dancing.

Clearly, Willie’s encores are strategic. Anybody interested in moving has got himself (or herself) a partner, and we stomp and shake and push it on back. The sweat, collecting in a cloud below the wooden ceiling, holds the tensions escaping from the constituency. The proverbial cultural walls topple; everybody joins hands and hips and hearts and dances so hard that sight and perception become figurative. That is when you understand the juke joint. It is the finale to the workingman’s week, the only chance you have after everything else to purge yourself of any ill will. And by God, if you neglect to do it at this point, nobody else is going to do it for you. While juking is a endangered art form, it is also a foolishly outdated therapy that gets you back to yourself: thumping the floor, throwing your hands up, and forgetting what ails you.

 

Natalie Elliott is a traveler and writer from Birmingham, Alabama. She recieved the Princeton Poetry Prize in 2001 as well as the award for Best Undergraduate Fiction Writer from the University of Alabama in 2003. Among many other qualifications, she can type 75 words a minute with 99% accuracy (!).

 

She can be reached through her JumpArtist profile or at natalie.elliott@gmail.com.