About midnight one steamy Delta night I was in a crowded juke joint. The joint was jumping, the band hot and playing down ‘n' dirty blues. The couples on the dance floor were hotter than the night and the music, grinding their bodies together in a seemingly copulatory ritual. In the center of the band and the bandstand, surrounded by guitars, a skinny little man blew his heart and soul through a shiny silver trumpet.

He was 40 or so, but he was the size of perhaps an average 12-year-old boy. Maybe he weighed 125 lbs soaking wet. His skin was jet black. He wore a white silk shirt with long sleeves, and below the silk shirt he wore black pants and shoes. The effect in the dim light of the juke joint was like watching a flourescent white shirt playing a silver trumpet.

As I watched, mesmerized by his ghostly image and by the music he produced and by the effect of his music on the dancing couples, I sensed a disturbance to my left, toward the front door. I turned my head just in time to see and hear the door slam shut. In walked, or, rather, waddled, a black woman who weighed at least 300 lbs.

She waddled past me, a grim look on her face, and headed through the dancing couples. Like the sea when Moses parted it, they moved aside and left her a path. A path, I quickly realized, that pointed toward the bandstand and the ghostly white shirt and the silver trumpet.

The trumpet was raised and blowing a slow, bluesy beat that reminded me of

In the middle of strings the 300 lb woman grabbed the 125 lb man by the front of his flourescent white shirt and jerked him bodily from the bandstand. As he flew through the air, his left hand clutching his silver trumpet, his right hand swept down and miraculously grabbed the handle of his trumpet's case.

Toward the front door and through the parted sea of dancers she then marched, a hand behind her and clutching her man's flourescent white shirt and her man's hands clutching his silver trumpet and its case. Through the front door they went. It closed behind them. The guitars continued the bluesy beat as if nothing had happened. The dancing couples closed the path and continued their dance as if nothing had happened. I sat there wondering if my imagination had just played a trick on me.