Every time I visit Front Street in Mason, Tennessee, it seems that another building has been torn down, burned down, or has just fallen down from age and neglect. The once proud row of jukes, known locally as “cafes”, has been reduced to three or so which clearly have seen better days. Called the “Lower End” or the “row”, the clubs made Mason a sort of rural African-American Las Vegas, a milieu of “players” that a local resident once described in a feature article for the Commercial Appeal.
But the glory days are long gone, as are Club Tay-May, the Purple Rain, the Black Hut, the Red Hut, most of them reduced to vacant lots. As a photographer, musicologist and blogger, part of me wants to photograph what remains…after all, it may soon be gone. But there are a number of older African-American men and women hanging out on the porches, and I suddenly feel that taking their picture would be disrespectful, almost an intrusion.
I face this dilemma all too often as I drive through Delta areas, looking for old architecture, juke joints and holy sites of the blues. Often I will see a perfect photo opportunity, and yet I will know that my taking it would either anger local residents or at least raise suspicions about who I am and what I am doing, and I hate the tortured past of race relations that makes this the reality in towns like Mason.
So I don’t take the photo, riding past instead, feeling disillusioned and hopelessly cut off from that world that I find so attractive. Up on Highway 70, a group of young men are shooting basketball, and outside the old Fields School, another small group of young people is standing around in the gathering dusk. A sign says that the old school is now Club Maserati. Bozo’s Bar-B-Que, the other reason that I have come tells me that they are closing for the night and cannot serve me, and down the road Gus’ World-Famous Fried Chicken is also closed for the night. Suddenly I realize that I came out to Mason for nothing at all.