Who Killed the Mercy Man? - The American Scholar
Several years ago, the musician Mike Mattison fixated on the story of how Charlie Idaho killed the Mercy Man.
几年前，音乐家迈克·马蒂森 (Mike Mattison) 着迷于查理·爱达荷 (Charlie Idaho) 如何杀死慈悲人的故事。
Mattison found it in The Land Where the Blues Began, a celebrated memoir and cultural history by the folklorist Alan Lomax.
马蒂森在民俗学家艾伦·洛马克斯（Alan Lomax）撰写的著名回忆录和文化史著作《蓝调起源的土地》中发现了这一点。
According to one of Lomax’s sources, Charlie Idaho was a powerful Mississippi levee contractor who once murdered an SPCA humane officer who’d come to inspect Idaho’s mules for abuse or overwork.
根据洛马克斯的一位消息来源，查理·爱达荷是一位有权有势的密西西比河堤承包商，他曾经谋杀了一名来检查爱达荷骡子是否受到虐待或过度劳累的防止虐待动物协会人道官员。
“He walked Charlie Idaho’s line from end to end.
“他从头到尾都在查理·爱达荷的路线上行走。
Ain’t been able yet to find a mule with his shoulder well,” said Ed Lewis, a veteran levee camp laborer.
“我们还没有找到一头肩膀完好的骡子，”堤坝营地的资深劳工艾德·刘易斯说。
“And Mr. Charlie killed the Mercy Man.”
“查理先生杀死了慈悲人。”
Everything about the story spoke to Mattison, who has a degree in English and American literature from Harvard and now makes his living as a singer-songwriter, most notably for the Tedeschi Trucks Band.
这个故事的一切都与马蒂森有关，他拥有哈佛大学英美文学学位，现在以创作型歌手为生，最著名的是特德斯奇卡车乐队。
He was taken by the name Charlie Idaho, which struck him as both appropriately outsize and bizarrely out of place for a southern levee boss.
他的名字是“查理·爱达荷”，他觉得这个名字对于一个南部堤坝的老板来说既合适又显得格格不入。
He was even more fascinated by “the Mercy Man”—the idea that mercy could be embodied in a person, who could then be murdered.
他对“仁慈者”更加着迷——这种想法认为，仁慈可以体现在一个人身上，然后这个人就可以被谋杀。
“And just realizing there wasn’t a ballad about it,” Mattison told me, “I just couldn’t believe that nobody else had bit on that.”
“当我意识到没有关于它的民谣时，”马蒂森告诉我，“我简直不敢相信没有其他人喜欢它。”
The result of these musings was “Charlie Idaho,” an eerily beautiful track from Mattison’s 2020 solo album Afterglow .
这些思考的结果就是《Charlie Idaho》，这是马蒂森 2020 年个人专辑《Afterglow》中一首异常美丽的歌曲。
Mattison sings with bitter resignation from the point of view of an eyewitness—“someone who was there, and who continues to be there”:
马蒂森从目击者的角度带着苦涩的无奈唱道——“曾经在那里，并且继续在那里的人”：
Every mule’s working when the levee breaks.
当堤坝决堤时，每头骡子都在工作。
If the police don’t get you, it’s the cold and the snakes.
如果警察没抓到你，那是因为寒冷和蛇。
Charlie gonna fix it, whatsoever it takes, And what are you gonna do?
查理会不惜一切代价修复它，而你会做什么？
Charlie Idaho shot the Mercy Man, Shot the Mercy Man, Shot the Mercy Man.
查理·爱达荷射杀了慈悲人，射杀了慈悲人，射杀了慈悲人。
Charlie Idaho shot the Mercy Man.
查理·爱达荷射杀了慈悲人。
At least the poor boy died.
至少那个可怜的男孩死了。
But Mattison, it turns out, isn’t the first musician to sing about the murder, and Idaho wasn’t the first “Mr. Charlie” to be accused of committing it.
但事实证明，马蒂森并不是第一个歌唱这起谋杀案的音乐家，而爱达荷州也不是第一个被指控犯有谋杀案的“查理先生”。
Lomax encountered at least three versions of the story during his decades of fieldwork, each one fingering a different levee boss for the crime.
洛马克斯在数十年的实地考察中至少遇到了这个故事的三个版本，每个版本都指责不同的堤坝老板犯下了这起罪行。
There’s a hazy, half-legendary quality to all of the accounts, but I’m increasingly convinced that they refer to a single historical event.
所有的叙述都有一种模糊的、半传奇般的品质，但我越来越相信它们提到的是一个单一的历史事件。
And although I can’t prove it, I strongly suspect that Mattison’s “Charlie Idaho” is only the most recent contribution to a once-vital but almost completely undocumented lyric tradition.
虽然我无法证明这一点，但我强烈怀疑马蒂森的《查理·爱达荷》只是对曾经至关重要但几乎完全没有记录的抒情传统的最新贡献。
To the eye, the Mississippi River levee is not all that striking—a modest, grassy slope rising 30 or 40 feet above the floodplain.
从表面上看，密西西比河的堤坝并不那么引人注目——它是一个平缓的草坡，高出洪泛区 30 或 40 英尺。
But its subtlety belies its size.
但它的微妙掩盖了它的规模。
The levee system stretches from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, all the way to New Orleans.
堤坝系统从密苏里州吉拉多角一直延伸到新奥尔良。
And because the earthen embankments follow, on both sides, the meandering course of the river and many of its tributaries, they collectively extend nearly 4,000 miles.
由于土堤两侧都沿着河流及其许多支流的蜿蜒河道，它们总共延伸了近 4,000 英里。
It’s a truly massive human achievement, rivaling the Great Wall of China and the Pyramids of Giza.
这是人类真正的巨大成就，可与中国的长城和吉萨金字塔相媲美。
And like those peers, the levee was built largely by a desperate underclass.
和那些同辈人一样，这座堤坝主要是由绝望的下层阶级建造的。
Prior to the Civil War, a combination of enslaved men, convicts, and immigrant laborers worked along the river.
内战之前，奴隶、囚犯和移民劳工在河边工作。
After Emancipation, and the creation of the Mississippi Levee Board in 1879, Black men with few employment options entered what was effectively a peonage system when they joined a levee camp.
奴隶制解放和 1879 年密西西比河堤委员会成立后，几乎没有就业选择的黑人在加入堤坝营地时就进入了实际上是劳役制度。
Bosses forced them to work 16-hour days, housed them in flimsy tents surrounded by piles of trash and feces, and fed them stews of stale beans, greens, stalks, and roots.
老板们强迫他们每天工作 16 个小时，把他们安置在周围都是垃圾和粪便的简陋帐篷里，给他们炖不新鲜的豆子、蔬菜、茎和根。
They withheld pay, drove men into debt by charging extortionate prices at the commissary and dealing them stopgap loans at 25 percent interest, and beat them with impunity.
他们克扣工资，在小卖部向人们索要高价，并以 25% 的利息向他们发放临时贷款，迫使人们负债累累，并且对他们进行殴打而不受惩罚。
A worker could leave at his own risk, but he had no legal recourse; contractors and their henchmen were the law of the levee.
工人可以自行承担风险离开，但他没有法律追索权；承包商及其追随者是堤坝的法律。
“It is no exaggeration,” wrote the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins in 1933, “to state that the conditions under which Negroes work in the federally-financed Mississippi levee construction camps approximate virtual slavery.”
全国有色人种协进会的罗伊·威尔金斯 (Roy Wilkins) 在 1933 年写道：“毫不夸张地说，黑人在联邦资助的密西西比河堤建设营地中工作的条件几乎接近奴隶制。”
From that misery came a bittersweet music—specifically the slow-moaned, hypnotic work songs known as levee camp hollers.
从这种痛苦中传来了一种苦乐参半的音乐——特别是缓慢呻吟、催眠的工作歌曲，被称为堤坝营地呼喊声。
Men pushing wheelbarrows or driving mule teams filled the air with what Lomax called the “wondrous recitativelike vocalizing through which black labor voiced the tragic horror of their condition.” These hollers, along with the more rhythmic work songs of section and chain gangs, prefigured the Delta blues.
推着独轮手推车或赶着骡子的男人们，空气中充满了洛马克斯所说的“黑人劳工通过这种奇妙的朗诵般的声音表达了他们处境的悲惨恐怖”。这些叫喊声，以及乐队和铁链帮更有节奏的工作歌曲，预示着三角洲布鲁斯。
In 1938, Lomax recorded several original songs by Sampson Pittman, a blues guitarist and former levee worker from Arkansas who had recently moved up to Michigan.
1938 年，洛马克斯录制了桑普森·皮特曼 (Sampson Pittman) 的几首原创歌曲。桑普森·皮特曼是一位布鲁斯吉他手，也是来自阿肯色州的前堤坝工人，最近搬到了密歇根州。
In “ I’ve Been Down in the Circle Before ,” Pittman recalled the dispositions of various contractors he’d known, including “Bullyin’ George Miller,” Charley Lowrance, and Forrest Jones.
在《我之前就在圈子里》中，皮特曼回忆了他所认识的各种承包商的性格，包括“欺负人的乔治·米勒”、查理·劳伦斯和福雷斯特·琼斯。
Lomax speculated that Pittman, “safe in his Detroit apartment, a long way from retribution and with the whiskey flowing,” felt free to name names:
洛马克斯推测，皮特曼“安全地待在底特律的公寓里，远离报复，而且威士忌在流动”，他可以随意说出名字：
There’s Mister Forrest Jones, Ain’t so long and tall, Killed the Mercy Man And he like to kill us all.
福雷斯特·琼斯先生，个子不高，杀了慈悲人，他喜欢杀了我们所有人。
Driving across Mississippi a few years later, Lomax picked up a one-legged Irish hitchhiker named “Black Hat” McCoy.
几年后，洛马克斯开车穿越密西西比州，搭上了一位名叫“黑帽”麦考伊的单腿爱尔兰旅行者。
A levee worker since the 1880s, McCoy was full of stories about how lawless the camps were.
麦考伊自 1880 年代以来一直是一名堤坝工人，他充满了关于难民营如何无法无天的故事。
He told of how the commissaries used to sell cocaine, and how he’d lost his leg because a fellow worker had shot him “and the company doctor was drunker than usual that day.” Eventually he got around to the tale of “Charley Silas—the big contractor who made a million and, when he went broke, walked off in the river.” Silas, he said, was infamous for shooting “the Mercy Man, which was the humane officer out of Memphis.
他讲述了小卖部过去是如何出售可卡因的，以及他是如何因为一名同事开枪打死他而失去了一条腿，“那天公司医生比平时喝得更醉”。最终，他讲起了“查理·塞拉斯——一个赚了一百万的大承包商，当他破产时，在河里走开了”的故事。他说，塞拉斯因射杀“仁慈者”而臭名昭著，“仁慈者”是孟菲斯的一位人道官员。
This fellow came out to Silas’s camp and protested against him working mules with sore necks and shoulders.
这个家伙来到塞拉斯的营地，抗议他用脖子和肩膀酸痛的骡子干活。
…
……
An argument came up over this and Silas shot the Mercy Man dead.
为此发生了争执，塞拉斯开枪打死了慈悲人。
It cost him fifty thousand dollars to get out of the mess.”
他花了五万美元才摆脱困境。”
It wasn’t until 1959 that Lomax heard Ed Lewis, then an inmate at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, attribute the killing of the Mercy Man to Charlie Idaho.
直到 1959 年，洛马克斯才听到当时密西西比州立监狱的囚犯埃德·刘易斯 (Ed Lewis) 将杀害慈悲人的凶手归咎于查理·爱达荷 (Charlie Idaho)。
Lewis was careful to disclaim any firsthand knowledge of the event: “That happened way back in the twenties, when I was quite a baby,” he said.
刘易斯小心翼翼地否认对这一事件有任何第一手了解：“那件事发生在二十多岁的时候，当时我还是个婴儿，”他说。
“Nothing I know, just something I hear.”
“我什么都不知道，只是我听到的一些事情。”
All three of those alleged killers were real levee contractors and bosses, and it’s not difficult to imagine any one of them shooting a man for inconveniencing him.
这三名被指控的凶手都是真正的堤坝承包商和老板，不难想象他们中的任何一个人都会因为给一名男子带来不便而开枪射击。
Forrest Jones—grandnephew of the Confederate general and KKK cofounder Nathan Bedford Forrest—was notoriously cruel to his workers.
福雷斯特·琼斯（Forrest Jones）是南方联盟将军、三K党联合创始人内森·贝德福德·福雷斯特（Nathan Bedford Forrest）的侄孙，他对他的工人极其残忍，这是出了名的。
Government investigations in the 1920s and ’30s identified his camps as dangerously unsanitary and criminally exploitative.
20 世纪 20 年代和 30 年代的政府调查发现，他的营地极其不卫生，而且存在剥削犯罪行为。
Pittman wasn’t the only camp veteran to recall Jones in song.
皮特曼并不是唯一一个在歌曲中回忆起琼斯的集中营老兵。
In a levee camp holler recorded by Lomax in 1942, Charley Berry (the brother-in-law of Muddy Waters) sang of “old Bullyin’ Forrest Jones.” Berry told Lomax he had decided not to work for Jones after seeing him viciously beat a Black employee with a root: “I don’t remember what kind of root it was, but I’ll tell you this: he wore hell out that n—— head with it.”
在 Lomax 于 1942 年录制的一段堤坝营地喊叫声中，查理·贝瑞（Muddy Waters 的妹夫）唱到了“老欺负人的福雷斯特·琼斯”。贝里告诉洛马克斯，在看到琼斯用树根恶毒地殴打一名黑人雇员后，他决定不再为琼斯工作：“我不记得那是什么树根，但我会告诉你：他用它把那个n——头磨坏了。”
“Charlie Idaho” (a very southern mishearing of his real surname, Aderholdt) regarded the beating of Black workers as just another part of his job.
“查理·爱达荷”（他的真姓阿德霍尔特的一个非常南方的误读）认为殴打黑人工人只是他工作的另一部分。
When Lomax found and interviewed him in 1942, Aderholdt congratulated himself on having “never crippled a n——” in 46 years on the levee.
1942 年，当洛马克斯找到并采访他时，阿德霍尔特庆幸自己在堤坝上的 46 年里“从未使任何人瘫痪”。
“I’d go after them with a club or a whip,” he said, “never with my bare hands—a man would have been a fool to do that—and when I was through with them, they was better workers.”
“我会用棍棒或鞭子去追他们，”他说，“从来不徒手——如果一个人这么做的话，那就太傻了——当我和他们打完之后，他们就成了更好的工人了。”
Both Jones and Aderholdt appeared in the newspapers from time to time, usually in business- or society-page items, occasionally for some small legal trouble, but never for murder.
琼斯和阿德霍特都时不时地出现在报纸上，通常出现在商业或社会版面的文章中，偶尔会因为一些小的法律纠纷而出现，但从来不会因为谋杀而出现。
And though the killing of Black men could, and did, go unreported in the papers and uninvestigated by the police, the killing of a prominent white man—an animal welfare officer, for example—would have created a stir.
尽管杀害黑人的事件可以而且确实没有在报纸上报道，也没有受到警方的调查，但杀害一位著名的白人——例如一名动物福利官员——会引起轰动。
Which is exactly what happened on June 28, 1909, when levee boss Charles Siler (not Silas) shot the Mercy Man at a camp outside Memphis.
这正是 1909 年 6 月 28 日发生的事情，当时堤坝老板查尔斯·西勒 (Charles Siler)（不是塞拉斯）在孟菲斯郊外的一个营地射杀了慈悲人。
This story resurfaced last summer when I ran a newspaper archive search on the terms “humane officer” and “mercy man.” According to the Commercial Appeal, George F.
去年夏天，当我对报纸档案进行“人道官员”和“仁慈者”这两个词的检索时，这个故事再次出现。根据商业上诉，乔治·F.
Guernsey had paid a visit to Siler’s camp and found half a dozen mules too “sore” for labor.
根西岛参观了塞勒的营地，发现六头骡子太“酸痛”，无法劳作。
When a worker informed Siler that “the ‘mercy man,’ as the humane officer was known to the negroes, had corralled a bunch of his mules,” Siler confronted Guernsey and cussed him out.
当一名工人告诉席勒，“黑人对这位人道官员的称呼是‘仁慈者’，他把他的一群骡子圈起来”时，席勒与根西岛对峙，咒骂他。
A witness testified that Guernsey was preparing to arrest Siler—which, as a special officer, he was authorized to do—when Siler shot him three times from behind.
一名目击者作证说，根西岛正准备逮捕席勒——作为一名特警，他有权这样做——这时席勒从背后向他开了三枪。
It was Lomax’s one-legged hitchhiker, in other words, who had remembered the story correctly, only swapping out a couple of letters from the killer’s name.
换句话说，是洛马克斯的单腿搭便车者正确地记住了这个故事，只是替换了凶手名字中的几个字母。
There’s no way of knowing whether Siler really spent $50,000 “to get out of the mess,” but McCoy was right that he dodged a conviction despite the apparently damning evidence against him.
我们无法知道席勒是否真的花了 5 万美元“摆脱困境”，但麦考伊的说法是对的，尽管有明显对他不利的证据，但他还是逃脱了定罪。
Siler pleaded self-defense, arguing that Guernsey had reached for his pocket as though for a gun, and 10 of the 12 jurors were persuaded; one of them was a shirttail relative of the Mercy Man.
席勒以自卫为由，辩称根西岛像伸手拿枪一样伸手摸他的口袋，12 名陪审员中有 10 人被说服；其中一位是慈悲人的亲戚。
The judge declared a mistrial, the county’s attorney general vowed to re-prosecute, and Siler went back to work on the levee.
法官宣布审判无效，该县总检察长发誓要重新起诉，塞勒则返回堤坝工作。
In 1912, Engineering and Contracting magazine called him a man “who know[s] how to handle a negro and a mule as well as the average man knows how to handle his knife and fork.” Two years later, a single sentence in the Commercial Appeal noted that the murder indictment against “C.
1912 年，《工程与承包》杂志称他为“知道如何处理黑人和骡子的人，就像普通人知道如何处理刀叉一样”。两年后，商业上诉中的一个句子指出，针对“C.
W.
W.
Siler, who killed a humane officer,” had been dismissed.
席勒杀死了一名仁慈的军官”，已被解雇。
One fact that emerged incidentally from Siler’s trial testimony was that he had once killed a Black man, too.
席勒的审判证词中偶然出现的一个事实是，他也曾经杀死过一名黑人。
He didn’t say anything more about the circumstances, and the prosecutors didn’t ask, presumably because it wasn’t an extraordinary thing for a levee boss to admit—even while on trial for another murder.
他没有透露更多有关当时情况的信息，检察官也没有询问，大概是因为堤坝老板承认这并不是什么奇怪的事情——即使是在因另一起谋杀案受审时。
Siler had almost certainly worked men to death, but he wouldn’t have considered those actions to be killings.
几乎可以肯定，席勒曾把人活活打死，但他不会认为这些行为是杀戮。
That was just being a boss.
那只是当老板而已。
“Main thing about it,” Big Bill Broonzy told Lomax, “is that some of those people down there didn’t think a Negro ever get tired!
“最重要的是，”大比尔·布隆齐告诉洛马克斯，“下面的一些人并不认为黑人会感到疲倦！
They’d work him—work him till he couldn’t work, see!” Another of Lomax’s informants described seeing levee men die from exhaustion and be buried on the spot by the next load of dirt.
他们会为他工作——直到他无法工作为止，瞧！”洛马克斯的另一位线人描述说，他看到堤坝人员因精疲力竭而死亡，并被下一批泥土当场埋葬。
A phrase that folklorists heard again and again was, “Kill a n——, hire another.
民俗学家反复听到的一句话是：“杀一个——，再雇佣一个。”
Kill a mule, buy another.” Mules were expensive, but Black men were expendable.
杀一头骡子，再买一头。”骡子很贵，但黑人是可以牺牲的。
The sheer inhumanity of that calculus is another reason Mike Mattison finds the name “Mercy Man” so compelling.
这种计算的完全不人性是迈克·马蒂森认为“仁慈人”这个名字如此引人注目的另一个原因。
It appears to have been a Black coinage, and Mattison hears strains of what he calls “blues laughter” in it—the grimmest sort of gallows humor.
这似乎是黑人的杜撰，马蒂森在其中听到了他所谓的“布鲁斯笑声”——最残酷的绞刑架幽默。
“There are many things you could call this person, but they’re calling him a Mercy Man, and he’s coming to check out the mules,” Mattison told me.
“你可以用很多名字来称呼这个人，但他们称他为慈善者，他是来检查骡子的，”马蒂森告诉我。
“Nobody’s coming to check out the men.
“没有人会来检查这些人。
I have to believe that the levee workers were well aware of this irony, this high irony.
我相信，堤坝工人很清楚这种讽刺，这种高度的讽刺。
You could see somebody saying it with great disdain.”
你可以看到有人带着极大的蔑视地说出这句话。”
Over time, the term seems to have acquired a second meaning.
随着时间的推移，这个词似乎获得了第二层含义。
Several of Lomax’s sources told him that “the Mercy Man” referred to any powerful white man who was a friend to Black people and would intercede on their behalf.
洛马克斯的几个消息来源告诉他，“仁慈者”指的是任何有权有势的白人，他们是黑人的朋友，会为他们求情。
In “I’ve Been Down in the Circle Before,” Pittman seems to use the phrase in exactly this sense, singing,
在《I’ve Been Down in the Circle Before》中，皮特曼似乎正是在这个意义上使用了这句话，唱道：
Now Mister Charley Lowrance Is the Mercy Man, The best contractor, partner, That’s up and down the line.
现在查理·劳伦斯先生是慈善者，最好的承包商，合作伙伴，这是上下线。
To a person acquainted with both definitions, then, the murder of the Mercy Man would be the epitome of levee boss cruelty—and the ultimate occasion for blues laughter: At last, here’s a white man who takes as much interest in the welfare of Black people as the rest of society takes in the welfare of mules.
那么，对于熟悉这两个定义的人来说，慈悲人的谋杀将是堤坝老板残酷的缩影，也是布鲁斯笑声的终极场合：最后，这是一个白人，他对黑人的福利和社会其他人对骡子的福利同样感兴趣。
Our very own Mercy Man.
我们自己的慈悲人。
And they’ve killed him.
他们杀了他。
“That’s a very blues-minded view of the world,” Mattison said.
“这是一种非常忧郁的世界观，”马蒂森说。
“Like the blues itself, it’s funny-not-funny.”
“就像布鲁斯本身一样，它很有趣，但并不好笑。”
It’s not surprising that as the details of the murder receded in memory, the story attached itself to different men.
毫不奇怪，随着谋杀的细节逐渐淡入记忆中，这个故事又发生在不同的男人身上。
The most notorious levee contractors and foremen were easy enough to conflate.
最臭名昭著的堤坝承包商和工头很容易被混为一谈。
Socially and professionally, they were a cabal; newspaper searches for Charles Siler, Forrest Jones, Charles Aderholdt, Charles Lowrance, George Miller, and their ilk show them working for one another’s companies, marrying one another’s cousins, and carrying one another’s caskets.
无论是在社交上还是在职业上，他们都是一个阴谋集团。报纸上对查尔斯·席勒、福雷斯特·琼斯、查尔斯·阿德霍特、查尔斯·劳伦斯、乔治·米勒及其同类的搜索显示，他们为彼此的公司工作，与彼此的表兄弟结婚，并搬运彼此的棺材。
It didn’t hurt that an uncanny number of them were named Charles.
其中有惊人数量的人名叫查尔斯，这并没有什么坏处。
In Black story and song since antebellum times, “Mr. Charlie” had been a generic name for a white “bossman.” “All the way from the Brazos bottoms of Texas to the tidewater country of Virginia,” Lomax writes, “I had heard black muleskinners chant their complaint against Mister Charley, but the score of singers all disagreed about his identity.” Who killed the Mercy Man?
自内战前以来，在黑人故事和歌曲中，“查理先生”一直是白人“老板”的通称。洛马克斯写道：“从得克萨斯州的布拉索斯底部到弗吉尼亚州的潮水之乡，我一直听到黑人穿骡子的人高喊着对查理先生的抱怨，但歌手们对他的身份都持不同意见。”谁杀了慈悲人？
If levee bosses were just a bunch of interchangeable Mr. Charlies, then they all did.
如果堤坝老板只是一群可以互换的查理先生，那么他们都是如此。
The reason I suspect that the story of the killing circulated widely in lyric is the way Ed Lewis tells it to Lomax .
我怀疑这起杀戮的故事在抒情诗中广泛流传的原因是埃德·刘易斯向洛马克斯讲述的方式。
On the recorded interview, Lewis has just finished singing a levee camp holler, and Lomax asks whom he was working for when he first heard it.
在录制的采访中，刘易斯刚刚唱完一首堤坝营地呼喊声，洛马克斯第一次听到这首歌时就问他在为谁工作。
“Charlie Idaho!
“查理·爱达荷！
Money man!” Lewis responds, and then rattles off a couplet: “Charlie Idaho give a part, and Mr. Blair give a drag.
有钱人！”刘易斯回应道，然后连珠炮般地念出一句对句：“查理·爱达荷扮演一个角色，布莱尔先生扮演一个角色。
/ Wasn’t no end to them dollars them two mens had.” Moments later, Lomax asks about the identity of the Mercy Man, and Lewis again answers with a rhythmic patter: “Aw, Mr. Charlie killed the Mercy Man!
/他们两个人的钱不是用不完的。”过了一会儿，洛马克斯问起慈悲人的身份，刘易斯再次有节奏地回答道：“噢，查理先生杀了慈悲人！
He walked Charlie Idaho’s line from end to end.
他从头到尾地走着查理·爱达荷的路线。
Ain’t been able yet to find a mule with his shoulder well.
我还没有找到一头肩膀完好的骡子。
And Mr. Charlie killed the Mercy Man.”
查理先生杀死了慈悲人。”
Lewis clearly prefers to parry each of Lomax’s questions with a familiar verse, if one comes to mind.
刘易斯显然更喜欢用一首熟悉的诗句（如果有的话）来回避洛马克斯的每个问题。
His rhyme about the boss who gave “a drag”—incomplete payment of wages owed—was common on the levee.
他对老板“拖累”（拖欠工资未足额支付）的押韵在堤坝上很常见。
Likewise, “Ain’t been able yet to find a mule with his shoulder well” is a fragment of a floating verse: “Look all over the whole corral, / Couldn’t find a mule with his shoulder well.” Lomax writes that he heard those lines in every southern state, and they turn up on blues records by Texas Alexander and Mance Lipscomb .
同样，“还没有找到一头肩膀完好的骡子”是一首漂浮诗句的片段：“环顾整个畜栏，/找不到一头肩膀完好的骡子。”洛马克斯写道，他在南方每个州都听到过这些台词，并且它们出现在德克萨斯州亚历山大和曼斯·利普斯科姆的布鲁斯唱片中。
Mattison even includes a version of the mule shoulder couplet in “Charlie Idaho.”
马蒂森甚至在《查理·爱达荷》中加入了骡肩对联的一个版本。
Lewis’s answers to Lomax are a virtual anthology of migratory verses from levee camp hollers, and his near-rhyme about Mr. Charlie killing the Mercy Man is one of them.
刘易斯对洛马克斯的回答实际上是堤坝营地呼喊者的迁徙诗歌选集，他关于查理先生杀死慈悲人的近乎押韵的诗句就是其中之一。
He delivers it so readily and so rhythmically that whoever transcribed the interview for the 2014 boxed set of Lomax’s Parchman Farm: Photographs and Field Recordings used internal quotation marks and included a slash to denote a line break.
他说得如此轻松、如此有节奏，以至于无论是谁转录了 2014 年盒装《洛马克斯的帕奇曼农场：照片和田野录音》的采访，都使用了内部引号，并包含一个斜线来表示换行。
Hollering such verses would have offered a rare release to levee workers.
大声喊出这样的诗句会给堤坝工人带来难得的释放。
Withholding wages, overworking mules until their shoulders had harness sores, even killing the Mercy Man: these were quintessential levee boss behaviors, and if Black men were powerless to do anything about such cruelty, they could, at the very least, bear witness.
克扣工资，让骡子过度劳累直到肩膀生疮，甚至杀死慈悲人：这些都是堤坝老板的典型行为，如果黑人对这种残酷行为无能为力，他们至少可以作证。
It’s a tragic loss that so few hollers were recorded or preserved; as the scholar John Cowley has pointed out, they represent one of the oldest American protest song traditions.
被记录或保存下来的呼喊声如此之少，这是一个悲惨的损失。正如学者约翰·考利所指出的，它们代表了美国最古老的抗议歌曲传统之一。
So whatever became of Charles Siler?
那么查尔斯·西勒后来怎么样了？
As it happens, that’s yet another question that Black Hat McCoy had already answered.
碰巧，这是黑帽麦考伊已经回答过的另一个问题。
On the morning of Saturday, April 14, 1934, just north of the Harahan Bridge in Memphis, Siler rose from the bank on which he’d been sitting and walked into the Mississippi.
1934 年 4 月 14 日星期六早上，在孟菲斯哈拉汉桥以北，席勒从他坐过的河岸上站起来，走进密西西比河。
He entered the swift current, the Commercial Appeal reported, “as calmly as if he were entering a wading pool.” His body was recovered the following Tuesday, seven miles south of the city.
据商业上诉报报道，他进入了湍急的水流，“平静得就像进入浅水池一样”。他的尸体于下周二在该市以南七英里处被发现。
As delayed justice goes, it’s almost too poetic: Mr. Charlie seeking mercy from his lifelong nemesis, the river.
就迟到的正义而言，这几乎太诗意了：查理先生向他一生的宿敌河流寻求怜悯。
It’s tempting to hope that Siler’s conscience was haunted in his final years, but his life up to that point suggests that his misery had a more prosaic source.
人们很容易希望塞勒在他的最后几年良心受到困扰，但他迄今为止的生活表明他的痛苦有一个更平淡的根源。
He had always treated men (and mules) as means to an end, treated lives as measurable only by their monetary value.
他始终将人（和骡子）视为达到目的的手段，将生命视为只能用货币价值来衡量。
And by 1934, there wasn’t much money left in levee building.
到了 1934 年，用于修建堤坝的资金所剩无几。
He was 74, long unemployed, and living alone in a Memphis hotel.
他今年 74 岁，长期失业，独自住在孟菲斯的一家旅馆里。
Black Hat McCoy may have said all that needed saying about the interior life of Charles Siler: he “made a million and, when he went broke, walked off in the river.”
黑帽麦考伊可能已经说出了关于查尔斯·西勒的内心生活所有需要说的：他“赚了100万，当他破产时，就在河里走了。”
George F.
乔治·F.
Guernsey, the Mercy Man, was nearly 60 and a grandfather at the time of his death.
“仁慈者”根西岛去世时已年近 60 岁，已是祖父。
He seems to have been genuinely brave and admirable.
看来他真的很勇敢，令人钦佩。
One article said he belonged to the Grand Army of the Republic, meaning he’d served the Union while still in his early teens.
一篇文章称他属于共和国大军，这意味着他在十几岁的时候就为联邦服务。
Three years before his killing, he had helped the Memphis police chief disarm a man who was firing a pistol on a busy street.
在他被杀前三年，他帮助孟菲斯警察局长解除了一名在繁忙街道上开枪的男子的武装。
Even after Siler had put three bullets in him, Guernsey seemed more concerned with his responsibilities than his own health.
即使在席勒向他开了三枪之后，根西岛似乎更关心他的责任，而不是他自己的健康。
“I wanted to leave the mules and drive fast to the city with the wounded man,” said a trial witness, “but Guernsey insisted that the mules be driven on in, as he wanted to prove that he was right in taking the animals.”
“我想留下骡子，带着受伤的人快速赶往城市，”一名审判证人说，“但根西岛坚持把骡子赶进去，因为他想证明他带走这些动物是正确的。”
Last summer, I went looking for Guernsey’s descendants and was surprised to find a cluster of them living in northeastern Kansas, not far from my home in Lawrence.
去年夏天，我去寻找根西岛的后裔，惊讶地发现他们中的一群人住在堪萨斯州东北部，离我在劳伦斯的家不远。
They were fascinated to learn that people were still talking—and, occasionally, singing—about their ancestor’s death.
他们很着迷地发现人们仍在谈论——偶尔还唱歌——谈论他们祖先的死亡。
Brock Guernsey, a great-grandson of George, told me that the family had only recently discovered the true story of the killing, when a genealogist aunt of his turned up some articles.
乔治的曾孙布洛克·根西 (Brock Guernsey) 告诉我，当他的一位家谱学家阿姨发现了一些文章时，家人最近才发现了这起谋杀案的真实故事。
Prior to that, he said, their dinner table retellings of it had drifted pretty far from the facts.
他说，在此之前，他们在餐桌上重述的事情与事实相差甚远。
In one version, Guernsey’s attempt to seize the mules had become an attempt to steal someone’s horses.
在一个版本中，根西岛夺取骡子的企图变成了偷窃某人马匹的企图。
That, in turn, had evolved into a family joke about being “descended from horse thieves.” The humane officer who died in the line of duty had done some time as the black sheep of the family.
这反过来又演变成一个关于“马贼的后裔”的家庭笑话。那位因公殉职的人道军官曾一度成为这个家庭的害群之马。
It’s a perfect coda to his story, if blues laughter is to your taste—a poetic injustice.
如果布鲁斯笑声符合你的口味的话，这对他的故事来说是一个完美的尾声——一种诗意的不公正。
Even in memory, there’s no mercy for the Mercy Man.
即使在记忆中，慈悲者也没有怜悯。
Eric McHenry teaches at Washburn University and is a past poet laureate of Kansas.
埃里克·麦克亨利 (Eric McHenry) 在沃什伯恩大学 (Washburn University) 任教，曾是堪萨斯州桂冠诗人。
His book Original Gangster, about the man who inspired the “Stagger Lee” story and song tradition, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
他的书《Original Gangster》讲述了激发“Stagger Lee”故事和歌曲传统的人的故事，该书即将由牛津大学出版社出版。