The After-Monkey Blues

Willie Seaberry didn’t show for work one Wednesday. But that was unremarkable: Willie was a day laborer on a grain farm. He’d worked there sixty years, and it was a cloudy day, wet, the kind of day Willie knew wasn’t so great to farm. The boss gave him that trust—he knew that Willie knew what days to come to work.

The boss gave Willie more than just trust. He gave him a house to live in, too, a lifetime lease. A spot where Willie could do what he wanted. It was an old ramshackle thing, the kind of building you can’t imagine any way but old, cypress planks for walls and galvanized tin for a roof. On a day lost now to history, like so much else in this story, the house became more than a house. Maybe that’s where the trouble began.

It might just be the most famous house in Mississippi, or at least the most photographed. Its decay is offset by a loud array of signs, all hand-painted in the local style. Some clarify the rules: no loud music, no dope smoking, no sagging pants. One offers an invitation: “It’s on,” it says, alongside the phone number to call if you want to join the party at Po’ Monkey’s Lounge, the last rural juke joint in the Mississippi Delta.

Of course, the party’s over now.

When Willie Seaberry’s niece showed up that Thursday evening, the place was locked. Thursday was the one night each week that he opened his juke joint, as he’d done for more than fifty years. His niece would work the door. Willie’s cars were there, and their presence and the locked door worried her, so she called Park, the farm boss. Park called the police. They found him lying on his bed, his hands crossed, his feet crossed. “Right where he wanted to be,” Park says.

Willie Seaberry was 75 years old, about to turn 76—that’s what he told people, at least. He didn’t know. No one knew. No one really bothered with careful records, when it came to black boys born in the Mississippi Delta eight decades ago. Willie didn’t bother with careful records himself. Which was part of the trouble, too, when Willie died a famous man.

After he passed, the memories poured out.

“Po’ Monkey’s was a place that brought people together. The socks-with-sandals European crew. Born and raised Deltans, both black and white. Yankees like me.”

“He sure knew how to throw a party.”

“He truly cared about your experience and wanted to see that everyone was having a good time.”

There is no address for the place on TripAdvisor,...